Fire under the Ashes: An Atlantic History of the English Revolution 9780226072869

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Fire under the Ashes

Fire under the Ashes An Atlantic History of the English Revolution JOHN DONOGHUE

The University of Chicago Press chicago a nd london

j o h n d o n o g h u e is associate professor at Loyola University Chicago specializing in the history of the early modern Atlantic world. He lives with his family in Pittsburgh. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2013 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2013. Printed in the United States of America 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13

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isbn-13: 978-0-226-15765-8 (cloth) isbn-13: 978-0-226-07286-9 (e-book) doi: 10.7208/chicago/9780226072869.001.0001 (e-book) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Donoghue, John (Historian) Fire under the ashes : an Atlantic history of the English revolution / John Donoghue. pages. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-226-15765-8 (cloth: alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-226-07286-9 (e-book) 1. Great Britain—History—Civil War, 1642 –1649. 2. Great Britain—History—Commonwealth and Protectorate, 1649 –1660. 3. Great Britain—Colonies—America. 4. Slavery—America. I. Title. da415.d656 2013 942.06′2—dc23 2013009940

This paper meets the requirements of a nsi/niso z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To the memory of my father, James L. Donoghue— “I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith.” 2 Timothy 4:7

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

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part i 1 2 3 4

Reformation Work Colonization and Its Discontents: The English Atlantic before the English Revolution “To Engage You All to Rise Up in Your Might”: The Outbreak of the English Revolution “Monsters,” “Savages,” and “Turbulent Carriages”: The Revolutionary Atlantic in Motion

11 45 83 120

part ii 5 6 7

“An Arrow against All Tyrants”: Popular Republicanism and the English Revolution “That Crimson Stream of Blood”: The Imperial Turn of the English Revolution “The Axe Is Laid to the Root”: Freedom against Slavery in the Revolutionary Atlantic

Epilogue Notes Index

163 198 239 277 295 353

Acknowledgments

t h e r e are many pleasures involved in writing a book. One of the greatest is thanking the people and institutions that make them possible. Generous research funds were provided by the American Historical Association; the Boston Athenaeum; the International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World (Harvard University); the Forum for European Expansion and Global Interaction; the College of Arts and Sciences, the Graduate School, and the Joan and Bill Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage of Loyola University Chicago; and the Department of History and Center for West European Studies of the University of Pittsburgh. Research for the book was conducted in several European and American archives. I am grateful to the staffs of the libraries listed here for their expert help and assistance: the Bodleian Library (University of Oxford); the Boston Athenaeum; the British Library (London); the British Museum (London); the British National Archives (Kew Gardens); the Cudahy Library (Loyola University Chicago); Dr. Williams’ Library (London); Hillman Library (University of Pittsburgh); the Houghton Library (Harvard University); the Folger Library (Washington, DC); the Huntington Library (San Marino, CA); the International Institute for Social History (Amsterdam); the John Carter Brown Library (Brown University); the King’s Inns Library (Dublin); the Library of Congress (Washington, DC); the London Metropolitan Archives; the Massachusetts Historical Society (Boston); the Neville Public Museum (Milwaukee); the National Library of Ireland (Dublin); the Newberry Library (Chicago); the Newport (RI) Historical Society; the Long Room Library (Trinity College Dublin); the Rhode Island Histori-

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cal Society (Providence); and the Rhode Island State Archives (Providence). A short-term fellowship from the Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin, gave me the opportunity to spend more time researching the English Republic’s conquest of Ireland. I am grateful for this opportunity and for the many kindnesses that Jason McElligott, Jane Ohlmeyer, Micheál Ó Siochrú, and Graeme Murdock showed to me during those happy days in Dublin. Special thanks also go to David Armitage, Bernard Bailyn, Simon Middleton, and Billy G. Smith, who in different venues and at different stages of my research encouraged me to continue developing the themes that eventually came to mark this book. Along with a legion of other Atlanticists, I owe a particularly deep debt to Bernard Bailyn, whose International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World at Harvard University has launched so many excellent scholarly projects. For decades, Professor Bailyn has labored tirelessly, selflessly, and successfully, especially through his work with rising scholars, to establish Atlantic history as a rich and vibrant field of study. Many colleagues, friends, students, and mentors assisted and encouraged me throughout the writing of the book with their time, insight, support, and not a few very excellent meals: Aaron Brunmeier, Dina Berger, Robert Bucholz, Corey Capers, Denver Brunsman, Bernard Capp, Anthony Cardoza, Charlotte Carrington, David Dennis, Todd Depastino, Anthony DiLorenzo, Seymour Drescher, Mari Dumbaugh, Erin Feichtinger, William Fusfield, Alison Games, Michael Goode, Elliott Gorn, Janelle Greenberg, Drew Haberberger, Christopher S. Hayward, Esq., Evelyn Jennings, Nathan Jeremie-Brink, Suzanne Kaufman, Anthony Kieran, Michael Khodarkovsky, Peter Kotowski, Peter Linebaugh, John McAdoo, Fr. Matthew McClain, Fr. John McManamon, SJ, Ted Mette, Michelle Nickerson, John Powell, the students of Hist 300: Slavery and Abolition—Then and Now (spring 2009), Elodie Peyrol, John Pincince, Barbara Rosenwein, Kim Searcy, Peter Thompson, Laurel Trojan, Prof. David Twining and the Westminster College (PA) History Honors Society, Peter Way, and Betty Wood. Simon Middleton has repeatedly gone above and beyond the call of duty to help in this undertaking and deserves special notice here. Like Simon, my fellow Harvard Atlantic Seminarian Denver Brunsman has been an unfailing source of insight and inspiration for many years. Jonathan Scott, who served on my dissertation committee, has had a powerful influence on my work; he also became a good friend, patient teacher, and benevolent taskmaster while we were both at the University of Pittsburgh. A special note of thanks goes to my all-star editor Robert Devens of the University of Chicago Press, whose

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wit and conversation are as sharp as his editorial eye. Although Robert left the Press in the final publication stages of the book, his work and that of his former colleagues at Chicago, Russ Damian and Ruth Goring, have made it much better than it would have been otherwise. I apologize in advance to all those I have inadvertently failed to acknowledge here. You know who you are—thank you. I am very lucky to work at Loyola University Chicago, which through its Jesuit mission strives to make the pursuit of social justice an integral part of higher education. I am grateful for the help and friendship of my colleagues in the history department and elsewhere in the university, whose collegiality, good humor, and dedication to teaching, service, and scholarship have been a true inspiration. I thank them all collectively here, with special mention to Timothy Gilfoyle, a brilliant historian and dear friend whose devotion to his family, colleagues, and profession, as well as his warm Irish hospitality, is impossible to match but easy to admire. Sadly, another Chicago-based scholar, the great historian of the American Revolution Alfred F. Young, passed on as I readied Fire under the Ashes for publication. Al took a special interest in my work and spent a lot of time improving it. Perhaps the best tribute that I can pay to Al is to say that if he had not rediscovered George Robert Twelves Hewes, I would never have found Samuel How. The scholar to whom I owe the most is my friend and fellow creature Marcus Rediker at the University of Pittsburgh. The deep humanity that pervades his work has served as a constant source of inspiration for me as a teacher, as a scholar, and as a citizen of the world. I’ve learned from Marcus that the archives are full of freedom stories, and that they can serve as the highest form of intellectual history. Finally, it’s beyond my powers as a writer to properly thank my family. The wheel of fortune turned kindly in my favor when I inherited Ray and Fran Golli as in-laws. Their love and vivacity flow from a seemingly inexhaustible source. My hipster brother-in-law Jon and his precociously accomplished partner, Kathryn Heidemann, have done their best to keep me from drifting into hopeless nerd-dom; while they have failed terribly, they bear no part of the blame. My cousin Sean Donoghue provided welcome relief from the daily grind of scholarship with epic tales of sport and family lore, while another cousin, Tom Wickham, revived my spirits a long way from home during research trips to Boston and Dublin. My brother Patrick, the real intellectual in the family, has one of the most eccentric senses of humor known to humankind, something which my gallant sister-in-law

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Missy bears with the patience of a real saint. I’ll never forgive Pat for turning a double play from second better than I could have ever dreamed; but aside from this not insignificant grudge, his friendship is one of the greatest prizes of my life. My sister the award-winning teacher Ann Haring moved away to Rome as I began this book. The fact that the man who carried her away, my brother-in-law Paul, is such a mensch makes the distance a little easier to bear. Annie first introduced me to the puritans during her college days as an American studies major, and I’ve never looked back. Her own faith has been a light to me and to countless others; now it shines in the Eternal City. My mother, Ann Donoghue, is the strongest person that I know; it was her sense of history and her love of justice that first awakened my own interest in the past and how it lives among us in the present. How can I begin to thank her for this? My wife Laura deserves her own book of acknowledgments. Laura has been the love of my life since the age of fifteen, my compass star in a sea of storms, and my best friend across three decades. This book simply could not have been written without her. Laura has also given me two miracles named Meredith and Norah, who have finally taught me what matters most in life. I see the spirit of my late father James Donoghue shining through their eyes every day. Dad died after a long and difficult battle with esophageal cancer during the writing of this book. He fought till the end like the Irishman that he was. He was the toughest and kindest man I’ve ever known. This book is dedicated to him with love and gratitude.

introduction R

Half the story has never been told. —Bob Marley on j a n ua ry 17, 1661, in the cold, crowded confines of an Old Bailey courtroom, the former Bay Colonist Thomas Venner was brought to trial on a charge of treason. It was a sorry spectacle, as Venner weathered a stream of abuse and insults from the bench. He lay all the while on a litter, bloody bandages covering the nineteen wounds he had suffered in the City of London at the head of a band of republican rebels who had set out to overthrow King Charles II. Although he could have pled for mercy from his judges, Venner faced his accusers without remorse; his head remained unbowed. As one of the rebels had explained to a friend, the insurgents had taken up arms “to pull Charles down, and settle a free state” so that an English republic might once again rise on the ashes of monarchy. Venner’s tiny militia, which included former colonists and veterans of the New Model Army, had been inspired by republican principles and apocalyptic expectations that had circulated around the Atlantic during the age of the English Revolution. In early January 1661, the rebels seemed to erupt everywhere in the City, “scattering” copies of their revolutionary manifesto, A Door of Hope, “about the streets,” as the bookseller George Thomason noted, while battling the trained bands and the King’s Life Guard in hand-to-hand street fighting.1 The rebels spilled first blood at St. Paul’s Cathedral as dusk descended on January 7. That evening they melted away to Ken Wood, only to reappear 1

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introduction

on Coleman Street two days later “like wild enthusiasts . . . besotted with hellish notions.” That winter morning and for the next three days, Venner’s rebels threw London into a state of panic, with shop owners shuttering their windows and citizens gathering arms as desperate firefights raged around the City and its northern suburbs. Samuel Pepys wrote that gentlemen would only venture out into the streets armed with pistols and swords. Pepys came by this information firsthand, as he had armed himself for his own foray into the City to see what he could learn of the uprising. By the evening of January 9, a troop of Royalists led by Colonel Cox had put the uprising down, capturing Venner and over twenty of his men after killing the rest. When the fighting finally subsided on January 10, Pepys noted in his famous diary that the rebels had broken through the City gates twice, put the King’s Lifeguard to flight, and repulsed repeated charges by the trained bands. In light of this impressive display, Pepys estimated that the rebel force numbered at least five hundred. He was incredulous to learn that he had greatly overestimated the size of Venner’s militia. “A thing that never was heard of,” he wrote, “that so few men should dare and do so much mischief.”2 Facing his hostile judges a week later, Venner delivered a remarkable speech from his bloody litter, listing the reasons why he and his men had once again unsheathed their swords on behalf of the Good Old Cause. For the edification of the court, the wine cooper recounted the seditious course of his political education, launching into a “bottomless discourse” about how the “testimony” of his life in “New England” had inspired his faith in the principles that had moved the saints to revolution in Old England. As Venner’s rebels proclaimed in A Door of Hope, the crusade of the saints was about much more than the fate of England, for they had brought true reformation out of the American “Wilderness” in order to emancipate the world itself from antichristian bondage. But Chief Justice Robert Foster remained unimpressed and sentenced the rebel to death. The next day, troops hauled Venner through the streets on a sledge to the old Fifth Monarchist meeting house in the City’s Coleman Street Ward, described by a Royalist pamphleteer as “that old nest of sedition.” Venner and his men had hatched their conspiracy in this very neighborhood, which the state, as a terror to other republicans, had selected as the site where the rebel chief would be hanged, drawn, and quartered.3 Venner’s dramatic courtroom reference to New England, while perfectly intelligible to his contemporaries, leaves today’s reader wondering how life in America informed his attempt to revive the English Revolution in the

introduction

3

streets of London. From our current vantage point, the New Jerusalem of New England seems a world apart from Restoration London. But while on trial for his life, Venner directly connected his “New England testimony,” or the meaning of his accumulated experiences in America, to his insurgency against Charles II. The rebel leader’s New England allusion confirmed the dim view of the region long entertained by Royalists. In one of the dozens of tracts written in the wake of Venner’s rising, a Stuart partisan fumed, “We’ll never deny [Venner’s] New England testimony, which has made Old England smart, having been the nursery and receptacle of sedition for too long.” In choosing these metaphors, the anonymous pamphleteer construed the region as both a breeding ground and a refuge for revolutionary puritans. The author felt no need to explain his symbolism, confident that his contemporaries shared his assumptions about the American sources of the Good Old Cause.4 But while contemporaries were quick to recognize the Atlantic context in which the English Revolution unfolded, only a talented and enterprising handful of historians have followed suit. Interest in the subject has, however, increased of late, and this book has been written with a mind to contribute to this growing body of work. It argues that our own confusion about Venner’s New England testimony might be clarified by moving beyond national historiography to recapture the seventeenthcentury view of colonization and the English Revolution as interrelated, interdependent developments in a wider Atlantic history. Following the circulation of goods, people, information, experience, and ideas around the early seventeenth-century Atlantic helps us recognize that the varied and often conflicting principles and programs of the English revolutionaries emerged from a historical context that reached far beyond the isles of Britain and Ireland. T h e smoke of Restoration bonfires had hardly cleared before scholars of the day, including the inestimable Thomas Hobbes in his opus Behemoth, began trying to make sense of the English Revolution. Why the revolution occurred, its place within the history of Britain and Ireland, the part it played in the genesis of the English (and later British) empire, and its relationship to the wider history of political and religious liberty have generated libraries of scholarship. Moreover and not less importantly, political movements from the late seventeenth century to the present have turned to England’s mid-seventeenth-century revolutionaries for inspiration, cautionary tales, and political perspective.5 Not very long ago, however, some historians began writing as if mid-

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seventeenth-century England, a land turned upside down by revolution, was a place void of revolutionary ideas and ideological discord. A few of the most outspoken scholars within this set laid dubious claim to superior powers of empirical insight and methodological expertise. Some even proclaimed that their interpretations of the period would remain unassailable, as they supposedly elided the political bias they found so circumspect in the work of the historians they opposed. Thankfully, more recent work has critically revived the reality of the Revolution, if not the ideological agenda of some of the scholars who had denied its historical importance. Accordingly, in this book no space will be wasted discussing whether these events (ca. 1640–60) amounted to a revolution: the abolition of monarchy and episcopacy, the execution of the king, the establishment of an English republic, and the first concerted attempt by the state to build an English empire in the Atlantic. It is self-evident that such profound changes were fundamental, systematic, and therefore revolutionary in nature. What is not self-evident at all is how to interpret, in the words of one of its most accomplished and deservedly celebrated historians, the “nature of the English Revolution,” for the event has never failed to provoke debate and disagreement.6 Fire under the Ashes hardly proposes to supply the definitive answers to these debates. Instead, the purpose of this book is to open up new discussions regarding the Revolution, particularly how its origins, progression, and legacy can be fully understood only in reference to the wider Atlantic world. The book represents part of a more general effort by a small group of Atlantic historians to move the study of the Revolution beyond European context as well the limiting confines of the national paradigm of historical analysis. Building on the work of these Atlanticists as well as that produced by historians of the Caribbean, early America, and early modern Britain and Ireland, Fire under the Ashes is the first monograph to explore both the Revolution’s impact on the colonies and how the Atlantic-wide circulation of colonial experience shaped the course of the Revolution in England. In this approach, the islands of Britain and Ireland join English colonies in the West Indies, New England, and the Chesapeake to form the English Atlantic, so called because English ambition brought these places into relationship with one another as well as with Native Americans and other European colonial powers. Although I do not treat events in Scotland in the depth that they deserve, Ireland, long studied by Irish historians as an early modern English colony, will be explored in this book as part of the larger Atlantic sphere in which revolutionary England pursued its colonial ambitions. While Africa and continental Europe did not fall under English domination, they were

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integral in the formation of the English Atlantic and are thus discussed as part of it. While the book gives ample attention to the Revolution’s origins in the political and religious conflicts that engulfed England, Ireland, and Scotland in the 1630s and 1640s, it is not a chronicle of the “Wars of the Three Kingdoms.”7 This book is about the English Revolution; Fire under the Ashes thus focuses on the revolutionaries themselves and forgoes a more general discussion of politics and warfare in the Three Kingdoms during the Revolutionary era, which would require a much deeper understanding of Royalism, popular English neutrality, and the competition for power in Scotland and Ireland than appears in these pages. Additionally, while I have drawn deeply upon Carla Gardina Pestana’s invaluable survey of colonial politics, religion, and economic life during the Revolutionary era, my book treats the European aspects of the period’s Atlantic history in much more detail than does Professor Pestana’s work, examining the relationship between colonization and humanist thought, the Protestant Reformation, and the social, political, and economic change that occurred in England in the decades before the outbreak of the Revolution. I thus enlist early modern European social and religious history and the manifold crises that gripped England, Scotland, and Ireland from 1639 to 1642 to explain the origins of the Revolution, its progress around the Atlantic, and the subsequent birth of English empire-building in the 1650s. Moreover, through its attention to colonization and empire-building, Fire under the Ashes explores how the history of the English Revolution intersects with the colonial history of native American conquests and the construction of an unfree labor regime that enslaved and exploited tens of thousands of people from Africa, the Americas, Britain, and Ireland. From this Atlantic perspective, the book examines how the political economy of the Revolutionary era helped give birth to the frontier and the plantation as colonial institutions that became integral to the formation of seventeenth-century racial hierarchies, steeped as they were in the blood and violence of mass enslavement, settler annihilation of Indian peoples, and catastrophic wars fought for the glory and power of empire. In terms of method, Fire under the Ashes, as one of many possible “Atlantic histories” of the English Revolution, uses the godly entrepôt of Coleman Street Ward, London, as a case study. My approach here, called cis-Atlantic history by the historian David Armitage, concentrates the global in the local to highlight how one particular point in the Atlantic shapes and is in turn shaped by the history sweeping across the entire region. Scholars have long noted Coleman Street Ward’s exceptional reputation within London, and

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indeed across the entirety of England, as an influential citadel of puritan religion and politics. None, however, have recognized the ward’s truly global importance. By taking the cis-Atlantic approach, I document how Coleman Street’s community of saints spawned diverse and contentious groups of puritan revolutionaries in England and its colonies. One group consisted primarily of ministers, merchants, and planters who through commerce, colonization, and revolution became heavily invested in the prospects for Reformation in England and abroad, not to mention the profits to be made from producing and trading provisions and cash crops in the colonies.8 While most of these figures remained in England, some, such as John Davenport, Theophilus Eaton, and Edward Hopkins, became important colonists, helping to found the New England church way and serving many terms as governors and counselors and as transatlantic emissaries for New Haven, Connecticut, and the United Colonies. While none of the figures in the first group are unknown to historians, this book, particularly through the case of the merchants Maurice Abbot and Martin Noell, argues that the full import of their contributions to early colonization, the imperial turn of the Revolution, and the construction of an unfree labor regime in the English Atlantic has yet to be appreciated. Another segment of Coleman Streeters hailed from classes and occupations that ranged from printers and merchant clothiers to sailors and cobblers; compared to their puritan opponents on Coleman Street, the members of this group, such as William Walywn and Samuel How, pursued a more radical vision of the Protestant Reformation that challenged the Revolutionary state and its imperial ambitions as gross betrayals of the Revolution.9 A third group of Coleman Streeters from varied social backgrounds included returned colonists such as Hanserd Knollys and Richard Saltonstall Sr. They would be joined on Coleman Street by other New Englanders, including Thomas Venner, Samuel Gorton, and Wentworth Day; unlike Knollys and Saltonstall, however, Venner, Gorton, and Day eventually made their mark as high-profile radicals in London who maintained their opposition to the Revolutionary regime throughout the interregnum. A final pair of colonists who circulated around the English Atlantic, Henry Vane and Roger Williams, had little to do with the puritan enclave of Coleman Street per se, but the transatlantic political networks they forged over the course of the Revolution contained strong ties to both the weak and powerful in the ward’s thriving puritan community. As this brief review of Coleman Street Ward’s colonial connections implies, and as this book will demonstrate, the surprising degree of geographic mobility that marked the mid-seventeenth century helped make the English Revolution an Atlantic event.

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This book does not focus on Coleman Street Ward because it was typical or representative; instead Coleman Street has been featured because it was atypical and exceptional in terms of how the people who lived there and the events that transpired there came to figure in the Revolution’s history in England proper. Coleman Street also offers an ideal place to locate an Atlantic history of the Revolution, which in turn allows us to grapple on a wider scale with what the late historian Christopher Hill called “the Revolution within the Revolution,” an apt phrase to describe how the internal tensions within the godly movement ultimately fractured the ranks of the revolutionaries along ideological lines. Fire under the Ashes builds on Hill’s thesis to show how the circulation of the godly’s colonial experience around the English Atlantic, informed by many of the same internal tensions that plagued the movement in England, shaped the Revolution and the fragmentation of the Revolutionary coalition, which developed in part due to the political polarization occasioned by the Revolutionary state’s decision to launch an ambitious project of empire-building around the Atlantic world. While important revolutionaries called Coleman Street Ward their home, the ward itself played host to historically significant events and developments in the decades before and during the English Revolution. These included the design of a public-private partnership by which the English state, merchants, and planters combined to force the English poor into unfree colonial labor, the lynching of Dr. John Lamb during the Petition of Right controversy, London’s most concerted resistance to the payment of ship money, the formation of the congregational church model, the development of the antinomian underground in London, the launching of petitioning campaigns and crowd actions during the constitutional revolution of 1640–42, the hiding of the five members who escaped King Charles I’s search for them in the House of Commons, the operation of Richard Overton’s radical underground printing press, the rise of the Leveller movement, planning for the invasion of the Spanish West Indies, and the rise of the most militant branch of the Fifth Monarchy movement. It also played host to Thomas Venner’s 1661 Fifth Monarchist rebellion, which represented the final act of the English Revolution. Coleman Streeters played important parts in the outbreak of the Revolution, made instrumental contributions to its advance throughout the 1640s, and guided the imperial turn the Revolution took in the 1650s. Other Coleman Streeters became indispensable figures in the most radical political causes undertaken during the Revolution, championing religious toleration and democratic republicanism in ways that put them at odds with their corevolutionaries. Throughout the 1650s, Coleman Street’s most militant republicans would organize their political efforts in a general disavowal

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of the massive scale of corruption, slavery, and carnage that accompanied the Revolution’s imperial progress as orchestrated in large part by their elite peers on Coleman Street. Taking its cue here from Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s The Many-Headed Hydra,10 Fire under the Ashes does not shy away from the violence of imperial expansion nor from that occasioned by its corollary, the proliferation of global capitalism. Indeed, my book purposefully provides a detailed account of the blood spilled in order to assess one of the Revolution’s most disturbing legacies: the needless killing and enslavement of hundreds and thousands of people from around the English Atlantic for the sake of profit, Protestantism, and English imperial glory. I have elected not to summarize each chapter in this introduction, as the ends of the chapters themselves include short synopses. In the process of organizing the chapters of the book, it simply proved impossible to create an intelligible straightforward chronological narrative capable of covering all the critical events as they unfolded at the same time around the Atlantic. Accordingly, the chapters move alternately, with some overlap in time, back and forth across the Atlantic. I also move back and forth across the Atlantic within several chapters, most notably 4, 6, and 7, to reinforce how the circulation of people, goods, ideas, and experience around the Atlantic littoral shaped the English Revolution. Finally, on a more technical note, all dates, punctuation, and spelling appear in their modern forms. This introduction began with an epigraph from the lyricist, musician, and revolutionary Bob Marley, a man of mixed African and English heritage. Marley, of course, hailed from Jamaica, the sugar colony first brought into England’s imperial orbit through the Revolutionary government’s invasion of the Spanish West Indies. This book addresses Marley’s admonition about leaving half the story untold in two ways. First, it casts a cold eye on the Revolutionary birth of the English empire by confronting its death-dealing genesis. Second, it recovers a lost legacy of the Revolution, an alternative vision of human freedom that formed in reaction to the empire’s birth. Fire under the Ashes demonstrates that over the course of the English Revolution there were people around the English Atlantic who recognized that slavery would prove lethal to godly liberty under republican forms of government. At bottom, and contra to the canon of Western political philosophy, these radicals were beginning to realize that the freedom of some could not rest with justice on the enslavement of others. I argue that in this realization, inspired in part by the rebellions of slaves themselves, lay the ideological origins of abolitionism, and thus the English Revolution’s most vital historical legacy.

chapter one R

Reformation Work

. . . And if things be not shortly reformed, [the people] will work a reformation themselves. —Anonymous billet, Coleman Street Ward, London, June 16281 a s i n all London pubs worthy of the name, a few rounds at the Nag’s Head could transform even the quietest drinkers into silver-tongued orators, inspired with the kind of eloquence that can only be found at the bottom of a brimming tumbler. But on that day in 1639, the spirit moving the man at the bar with the booming voice was not John Barleycorn’s. The cobbler Samuel How had come to preach and not to drink, and judging by the crowd buzzing at his elbow, the veteran of the “King’s forces land and sea” had learned his latest trade very well.2 Climbing into his impromptu pulpit, a wooden cask refitted for the occasion, How quoted Acts 10:34 and proclaimed to the assembled that “God respects no man’s person . . .” The enigmatic phrase, as the cobbler explained, meant that the Lord had no regard for the man-made distinctions of social class that justified the rule of the rich and eminent over the poor and the weak.3 Punctuating a rolling passage with a quote from 1 Corinthians 1:29, the “mechanic preacher” went on to warn that “no flesh shall glory,” a caution to the wealthy and well-educated that their achievements in this world did not guarantee glory in the next. How aimed these barbs straight at his invited guest, the Cambridge MA and noted puritan divine John Goodwin.4 As the vicar of St. Stephen’s Church, Goodwin did not have to travel far that day to hear How hold forth at the Nag’s Head, for both the pub and 11

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the parish could be found in Coleman Street Ward in the City of London. Londoners had long regarded the neighborhood as a kind of seminary for zealots of the puritan persuasion, a place where wild-eyed Bible-thumpers instructed the faithful in their strange and strident gospels. With a leathery, old cobbler preaching out of a barrel in a smoke-filled barroom, the scene at the Nag’s Head hardly dispelled these notions. Taking his text from the twelfth chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans, How proclaimed that “God’s ordinary way is among the foolish and weak and vile, so that when as the wise, rich, noble and learned come to receive the gospel, they then come to make themselves equal with them of the lower sort, the foolish, vile and unlearned; for those be the true heirs of it . . .”5 As a former soldier and sailor who had turned to mending shoes, How had run the gauntlet of some of early modern England’s least lucrative occupations; in preaching the Word to a Coleman Street audience consisting mostly of “the commonality” or the working poor, How personified this upside-down vision of the Christian kingdom.6 Unlike Goodwin and the other ordained ministers among the hundred or so who packed the pub that day, How did not pretend to be above or even different from the commonality, for as a cobbler he was truly one of them. Through the leveling power of the Holy Spirit, How hoped that the clergy would turn away from the pride of their learned wisdom and toward the inspired humility of the London poor, to find the courage and compassion to purge rather than serve the antichrist that they condemned.7 Samuel How went to prison for his sermon and died in jail in September 1640, hailed by his friends as a martyr murdered by the enemies of reformation.8 But while How’s aged and work-worn body proved too weak for prison, we will see later how the strength of his spirit helped to inspire the English Revolution. How’s story calls to mind another rebel shoemaker, the American Revolution’s George Robert Twelves Hewes, who like How had once sailed the seas and shouldered a soldier’s musket. As the historian Alfred F. Young once wrote about George Hewes, Samuel How “was a nobody who became a somebody in the Revolution and, for a moment near the end of his life, a hero.”9 As How’s set-to with Goodwin attests, before the English Revolution the godly made Coleman Street a central venue for interpuritan disputation as well as militant Protestant organization, all of which made religious issues political, economic, and social ones as well. Because it was the seventeenth century, interpuritan discord never revolved purely around religion. Evolving within the turbulent contexts of state centralization and the rapid economic and demographic changes sweeping early modern England, inter-

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puritan disputation also became a catalyst for popular politicization and class-conscious10 social criticism and reform. For many well-to-do saints, mastering the poor, seditious, and morally degenerate elements of the commonality became part of their own wide-ranging reformation project, although commoners inside and outside the godly fold would challenge such efforts by “work[ing] their own reformation.” As a result, from the late sixteenth century through the middle of the next, the desire for reformation, to transform the world in the image of divine purity and justice, ranged far beyond the realm of religion and remained a matter of ideological conflict rather than cohesion for the diverse echelons within the godly camp. Reformation work also took the saints far from home in the early seventeenth century, when Coleman Street puritans emerged at the forefront of English commercial and colonial expansion in the Atlantic world. Inspired by the lure of profits and the ideals of English humanism, puritans from the ward and their godly partners spearheaded privateering ventures and joint stock companies that created colonies and trading networks in New England, the Chesapeake, and the West Indies. As an alternative to the crown’s seemingly weak stance against Catholic Spain, the saints promoted these colonial projects as militant Protestant, civic solutions to the manifold crises facing the English nation at home and abroad. Their efforts created an English Atlantic of largely autonomous colonial commonwealths; a generation later, England’s Revolutionary government, led by many of the same colonial projectors, would try to consolidate these scattered Atlantic enclaves into a mighty and prosperous empire, a project that, as we will see, only exaggerated the ideological discord that radicals like Samuel How had helped to excite within the ranks of those who would lead England into revolution. A s one of the hundreds of thousands of desperately poor people living in London in December 1619, Walter Hill embodied the most tragic features of life in the booming metropolis. As a young, homeless child, Hill wandered the streets of a City whose resident gentry reaped rising rents and woolens profits from their newly enclosed country estates.11 Members of London’s mercantile elite looked outside England for their riches and expanded their fortunes in proportion to the reach of their global ventures. Predictably, wealth accumulated rapidly at the top. The city’s population grew as well, but mostly at the bottom, doubling in the seventy years following the turn of the seventeenth century so that London became Europe’s largest city, a sprawling metropolis of half a million people.12 While higher birth rates

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can help account for the growing English population, they alone do not explain England’s appalling levels of poverty and the destitution of London’s swelling masses: for such an explanation we must consider how those who owned the English economy actually organized it. When John Winthrop, a future founder of the Bay Colony, took note of the suffering of poor people in the City like young Walter Hill, he saw a social crisis “groaning for reformation.” “Why,” asked this Suffolk puritan in 1623, “meet we so many wandering ghosts in the shape of men, so many spectacles of misery in all our streets, our houses full of victuals, and our entries of hunger starved Christians? Our shops full of rich wares and under our stalls lie our own flesh in nakedness?”13 Historians have borne out the reality behind Winthrop’s lament. According to the research of the historian Paul Slack, the numbers of people on poor relief increased four times over and above the rate of population increase during the Tudor/Stuart era.14 When Winthrop wondered aloud about the causes of poverty, he posed rhetorical questions—he knew that vagrants did not drop from the sky. The poverty of people like Walter Hill was produced, as Winthrop later wrote, largely by the greed of opportunistic, enclosing, and rack-renting gentry. Eager to capitalize on profits from foodstuffs and the woolens trade, landlords enclosed common lands for grazing, converted other commons to private fields for arable agriculture, dispensed with feudal land tenures, and paid poverty wages to rural laborers, who emerged as a new class during the early modern period due in large part to these changes. Rural wage laborers had come to make up about half the English population at this time, although the roads, towns, and cities were also choked with homeless wanderers, made so in many cases through the so-called economic improvements undertaken by landlords. Rising rents, soaring food prices, and periodic declines in trade and agricultural prices: the personal impact of impersonal markets that operated increasingly on national and international scales hurt rural workers as well as the small producers of England’s towns, villages, and cities. The English poor surged forth from this unsettling yet profitable confluence of market forces, made worse in times of dearth and disease, taking to the roads in search of work in unprecedented numbers in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.15 Arriving in London, poor newcomers who could afford it settled in the backstreets. The novelist Daniel Defoe, whose family owned a warehouse in Coleman Street Ward, noted that the neighborhood “was, and is still remarkable particularly, above all the parishes in London, for a great number of alleys and thoroughfares, very long,” where people on the economic

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margins crowded into rickety, jerry-rigged tenement buildings. These tenements lined the alleys that traversed Coleman Street proper in a series of long, narrow, crooked passages that led to a warren of courtyards and lanes. The most important of these byways were Swann Alley, Bell Alley, and White Alley. One account described Swann and Bell Alleys as “so narrow that a horse and cart could not pass through.” The narrowness of the streets, coupled with the lack of open space within the Square Mile, forced Londoners to build up when they added on, and often three and four stories were piled atop the original timber-framed daub-and-wattle dwellings, with each addition jutting several feet farther into the street. Seventeenthcentury London poll taxes illustrate how the burst of tenement building affected the back lanes of Coleman Street Ward, which, like London’s other subterranean warrens, grew steadily more crowded in the decades before the Revolution. Between 1603 and 1637, the number of buildings in the ward tripled, with 176 new multi-tenant houses sprouting up in the midst of 102 preexisting single-family dwellings. One can easily imagine the swelling concourse of the poor streaming through the City streets. There, as a contemporary noted, “posts are set up of purpose to strengthen the houses, lest with jostling one another” the crowds of people “should shoulder them down.” Lost in these crowds were many children like Walter Hill who, having entered the ranks of the destitute after being orphaned or abandoned, had not even a hovel to call home. Home was in the streets.16 The descent of impoverished youngsters like Hill contrasted starkly with the ascent of self-made men like the wealthy Maurice (or Morris) Abbot, who like others of his station, lived on Coleman Street proper, “a fair and large street, on both sides builded with diverse fair houses.” While Abbot and those from his class typed Hill and other indigent children as wild and masterless threats to the commonwealth, they entertained high opinions of themselves as the founding fathers of England’s economic expansion. As Abbot’s friend the East India Company member Dudley Digges wrote in 1615, within a “few years . . . well-minded merchants . . . like Hercules in the cradle” would make England “a staple of commerce for all the world . . . to advance the reputation and revenue of the Commonwealth.” Hercules, as the historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker have written, “served as a model for the exploration, trade, conquest, and plantation” that inspired writers, statesmen, and colonial venturers of the early modern period.17 Maurice Abbot had taken on the labors of Hercules, through which he acquired a level of wealth and influence that few in London’s mercantile community could hope to rival. His initial voyage to Aleppo in 1588

im age 1. This early nineteenth-century drawing of seventeenth-century housing in Moorfields, immediately adjacent to the northwest of Coleman Street Ward, gives us a vivid image of the conditions in which the London poor lived during the era of the English Revolution. Taken from J. T. Smith, Ancient Topography of London (London, 1815). Photo appears courtesy of The Newberry Library (folio F 02455 .798).

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provided him with an insider’s knowledge of the Mediterranean trade that vaulted him to the Levant Company chairmanship from 1607 to 1611. In 1600, a budding acumen for Asian commerce had led to a founding membership in the East India Company, where he would serve as a director until 1624, when his peers elected him company governor, a post he held until 1639.18 The commercial ventures launched by Abbot and other cosmopolitan capitalists reached northward into the Baltic, circled the Atlantic, lined the African coastline, ranged across the Mediterranean, and spread into the East Indies and beyond all the way to Japan. As a colonial entrepreneur, Abbot partnered with a faction of puritan noblemen and merchants looking to unite their trading interests in the Mediterranean and Indian Oceans with a commercial and plantation empire in the Americas. Joining forces with the militant Protestant earl of Warwick, Robert Rich, to secure profits and to thwart the imperial expansion of their most despised foreign enemy, Catholic Spain, Abbot’s faction helped found the Virginia Company (1606) and the Somers Island (or Bermuda) Company (1615). Abbot’s career offers an excellent case study of how the rise of the English Atlantic depended on previous experience with commerce and cash-crop plantation production in Africa and all the lands encompassing the Mediterranean Sea and Indian Ocean regions. But as wild as his dreams of riches grew, as high as his hopes for godly reform soared, and as far as his ships sailed into the world’s oceans, the London poor would always be with Maurice Abbot.19 As a member of the St. Stephen’s parish vestry and as a common councilor and alderman for the City of London, Abbot administered poor relief in the parochial and municipal realms. He also helped draft ordinances against poor people like Walter Hill who, in violation of sixteenth-century antivagrancy laws, illegally decamped in London parishes. Importantly, Abbot paid the poor relief rates that he helped to set, a duty to the public good that we can be sure he and the more economically ambitious people from his class did not relish. While trying to keep the poor from starving, these self-styled guardians of the public weal also argued that the poor must not be allowed to starve the commonwealth of their labor. Their idle destitution, as the argument ran, equated economically with lost productivity and an upward trend in relief rates. 20 Abbot’s public-spirited concern about the poor’s detrimental impact on the commonwealth found ample support in the literature of early modern English humanism. The commonwealth writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who worked within this tradition had a highly classconscious view of politics and confined what they alternately called “the

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people,” “the body politic,” or “civil society” to three orders: the nobility, the gentry, and the propertied men of the third order. In his much-studied book De Republica Anglorum, the Elizabethan scholar, diplomat, and statesman Thomas Smith defined the commonwealth as “a society or common doing of a multitude of free men collected together by common accord and covenants among themselves for the conservation of themselves as well in peace as in war.” Smith argued that the commonwealth (or state) existed primarily for two reasons; first, it must uphold the rule of law in civil society as the foundation of the people’s liberties; second, the public good required the state to create conditions conducive for free men to enrich themselves in ways that worked toward the “common profit” of the people, as the body politic would waste away without fresh infusions of economic lifeblood. For Smith and other political anatomists, increasing prosperity depended upon increasing economic innovation, which often came at the expense of the fourth order, the unpropertied commonality. In Smith’s concept of the commonwealth, propertyless commoners did not belong to civil society. They were not part of “the people,” who according to the fictional covenant struck by its constituent members existed to conserve themselves as well as their civil liberties, which flowed from their status as property owners. Smith, along with most other English humanists, classified the propertyless as subjects without rights, to be mastered by their social superiors. Without a stake in the state, they were bound to remain in profitable subjection to the propertied, to become, as the famous biblical phrase had it, “hewers of wood and drawers of water.”21 As Smith wrote, in the body politic “only the wealth of the lord is . . . sought for, not the profit of the slave or bondman.” The commonality were “bondsmen,” “slaves,” and tools to be used as “instruments” for the gain of their “lord(s),” the “multitude of men” in the body politic. Through the liberty allowed them in their covenant, free men possessed the sovereign power to expropriate the value of the commonality’s labor for their own increase and for the increase of the commonwealth at large. Smith saw a role for the state in this relationship and according to some historians even went so far as to craft a 1547 statute calling for the temporary enslavement of poor commoners. Regardless of the question of Smith’s authorship, the slave statute enjoyed a very short life, as his compatriots were unwilling to take the bold step of legally enslaving other English people, at least in England itself. Perhaps the most important aspect of Smith’s thinking on the body politic and the public good is that it evolved mere political theory into a nascent

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political economy, a move that reveals how humanist principles regarding the commonwealth could translate easily into an ideology of colonization and empire-building. Smith and his contemporaries applied theory to practice in Ireland through the bloodshed of the Elizabethan conquests. Hundreds of thousands of Irish Catholics were killed in the Desmond (1569–73, 1579–83) and Tyrone Rebellions (1594–1603), through violence or planned famine, after resisting the “plantation” or colonization of Munster and Ulster. Few lofty-minded English humanists lost much sleep over the carnage; some such as Edmund Spenser infamously gloried in it. Less poetic than Spenser, Lord Justice Sir William FitzWilliam described the Irish to the Renaissance man Sir William Cecil as “a brute and bestial people . . . more craftier, viperous, and undermining” a generation than any other. According to Cecil’s humanist logic, if such savages stood in the path of civility’s progress, they could be justly destroyed for resisting the colonization of their own country. For his part, Thomas Smith invested in and actively promoted the lethal violence required for the conquest and colonization of Ulster, Ireland’s northernmost province. His successors in the seventeenth century would expand the lessons learned across the Irish Sea farther west, across the Atlantic Ocean in new English colonies.22 Much like the Catholic Irish as they faced off against their would-be colonizers, members of the English commonality entertained ideas about their own self-worth that conflicted with the dehumanized status afforded to them by English humanism. While deference shaped the norms of early modern England, so too did the values of Christian equity and a cherished heritage of political liberty, rooted in popular perceptions of the Magna Carta and an ancient constitutional tradition vested in the laws of Edward the Confessor. In economic terms, poor commoners understood their increasing destitution not simply as poverty but as impoverishment; destitution had causes, which pierced the thin skin of early modern deference. As a consequence, throughout the period poor commoners petitioned against press gangs, price-gouging shopkeepers, enclosing and engrossing landlords, monopolistic merchants, abusive magistrates, and machinating privy councilors, accusing them of the kind of sinful self-seeking that subjected the “freeborn” English people to their own corrupt and tyrannical designs. Importantly, these petitioning efforts often proceeded with the help of sympathetic or at least politically sophisticated members of the yeomanry and gentry.23 But members of the commonality did more than petition; they also rebelled. Indeed, rebellions and revolts by sections of the commonality in 1536,

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1549, 1554, 1569, 1596, and 1607 formed the backdrop against which English humanists evolved their thinking on how commonwealth government should work to secure the interests of the propertied body politic. Despite the variable contingent factors that explain why the uprisings occurred when and where they did, they all struck witnesses as organized, determined, and seditious affairs, in which “the poorest men . . . have been the greatest causers and doers.”24 One of these poor commoners, a tinker named John Reynolds whose followers christened him “Captain Pouch,” led the insurgency that broke out in Lincolnshire in 1607, the same year that English colonists dropped anchor at what would become Jamestown.25 Captain Pouch and the commoners under his command identified their own interests with the commonwealth’s through a class-conscious, bottom-up construction of liberty and the public good that supplied a radical challenge to the propertied commonwealth idealized by humanists such as Thomas Smith. As explained by Smith’s contemporary the cleric, geographer, writer, and colonial investor Richard Hakluyt (the younger), the “mutinous” revolts of the poor commons aimed at an “alteration in the state,” a fundamental reordering of the humanist body politic.26 The interrelated crises of mass impoverishment and class-conscious sedition from below presented frustrating problems of political economy to writers like Hakluyt, who set out to resolve them in a manuscript titled A Discourse on Western Planting (1583). Although written in support of Walter Raleigh’s first expedition to the ill-fated colony at Roanoke, the document read like a general blueprint for English colonization. In A Discourse, Hakluyt moved English colonial visions far beyond Ireland and into the Americas, where he believed profitable English outposts would thrive through economies based on commerce, agriculture, and artisan manufactures. Colonial imports like tobacco and sugar, luxuries that could soon become consumer staples, would prove a boon to small producers, retailers, and wholesalers while the customs duties and excise taxes levied on these and other imported colonial goods would raise public revenue. The commonwealth, in turn, would use the colonies as a captive export market for English farmers, merchants, victualers, and all those engaged in maritime trades and manufactures. But as recognized by both Hakluyt and his older cousin, a lawyer also named Richard, plantations required labor power; without enough of it, colonies would face economic disaster.27 Yet careful planning could avoid this dilemma, and as the younger Hakluyt observed, the teeming and mutinous poor of the English commonality could more than meet the projected demand for colonial workers. As Hakluyt wrote in

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A Discourse, “the fry of the wandering beggars of England that grow up idly and hurtful and burdenous to this realm” would “be unladen” in the colonies to be “better bred up” in a trade or some “useful, laborious activity.” “Young children . . . thieves . . . old folks, lame persons,” and “women shall be kept from idleness, and be made able by their own honest and easy labor to find themselves without surcharging others.” Through the logic of early political economy, Hakluyt theorized that colonial planters and manufacturers could capitalize upon the alleged idlers and seditionists who strained the resources and disturbed the peace of the commonwealth, transforming them into the human foundation of England’s future prosperity and imperial ambition. In A Discourse, we do not hear Hakluyt calling for forcible transportation, nor, as the author(s) of the 1547 Vagrancy Act had desired, the temporary enslavement of poor commoners, let alone the enslavement of Africans or Native Americans. And in line with good commonwealth principles, Hakluyt warned that avarice would destroy a colony framed in accord with Aristotelian and Christian concepts of equity to serve the common good of the English people, properly constituted.28 Transforming the country’s idle poor into profitable colonial labor provided humanists with a “civic solution” to England’s controversy with its seditious commonality; it also supplied an answer to the problem of how workers might be found to do the physical (as opposed to the discursive) heavy lifting necessary for colonial expansion.29 It also reinvigorated the militant Protestant principles that had guided England’s forays into the Atlantic since the late sixteenth century. John Donne, the famous poet and dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral, who in previous incarnations had served as a soldier on the Continent and as a member of Parliament for Brackley, delivered a passionate sermon in 1622 to an assembly of the Virginia Company’s principal investors. In a vision of Virginia’s evangelistic destiny, Donne reminded the company that a “catechism” would be “as good” as a “knife” or a “hatchet” to bring the wild men of America into the fullness of Christian civility. As to the savage poor of England itself, Donne proclaimed that “the plantation” in Virginia would “conduce [them] to great uses.” The westward current of colonization would “sweep your streets, and wash your doors, from idle persons,” channeling the stream of poor people coursing from the countryside into the City across the western ocean and into the colonies. Forcibly directing the current of poor migration beyond the seas served a sacred purpose for Donne, as hard labor in Virginia would “redeem” the poor from the spiritual death of sin and from physical death on the streets. Servitude would save the bodies and souls of the poor through

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a resurrection of the damned on earth, a saving of the dead that glorified the propertied body politic in both sacred and temporal time. In this way, the mastery that the state and its private partners exercised over the bodies of destitute children made for a miracle of political and spiritual economy, with degenerate youth transfigured into virtuous laborers laying the foundation for a militant Protestant empire.30 O n the morning of December 16, 1619, Maurice Abbot and Sir Thomas Wroth, both Coleman Street residents, began a short walk through the ward, shouldering their way through its crowded streets as they made for the Guildhall, the seat of City government. Located a few yards west of Coleman Street proper, the Guildhall played host that day to a meeting between members of a select committee of Virginia Company directors, including Abbot and Wroth, and the lord mayor and his committee of delegates from London’s Common Council. The two groups were convening to refine a two-year old public-private partnership designed to export poor young people from London to Virginia. The program called for constables to seize and remove such persons from the streets and to imprison them in Bridewell, where they would remain until the Virginia Company arranged for their transportation to the Chesapeake and a future of forced labor. The men behind the plan believed forced colonial servitude advanced the moral reformation of English society by turning the so-called lazy and degenerate poor into industrious, upright assets forced to work for the increase of the commonwealth.31 But while militant Protestantism and the public-spirited traditions of English humanism animated this plan, so too did the pursuit of profits, which would ultimately force the poor beyond the seas and into what many English people at the time recognized as slavery. Virginia’s recent turn to tobacco had brightened the colony’s formerly bleak prospects, much to the delight of the Virginia Company’s investors, although it also dimmed chances for realizing Hakluyt’s vision of a colonial economy balanced between farming, manufactures, and commerce. Maurice Abbot and the other cosmopolitan capitalists running the company knew that the demand for the fine Virginia leaf could encompass a global market, one that would take in Europe, the Levant, Africa, and the East Indies. The ensuing pressure that the company placed on planters to expand the tobacco crop did not bubble up from a discursive wellspring sparkling with the spirit of civic humanism. Instead, it resulted from a fateful addiction to “present profit,” which required more labor at a lower cost.32 While the company leaders may well have been sincere in their professed

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concern for the moral well-being of the poor, they were undoubtedly more disturbed by the lack of hands to harvest Virginia tobacco. Thus shortly after the December 19 meeting at the Guildhall, constables fanned out across the City and caught up fifty poor children in a dragnet meant to speed the colonial transportation plan. The Bridewell clerk took down the names of the captives. Among them was Walter Hill, the young man we met at the outset of the chapter. But as it turned out, despite his chance to become part of England’s ascent to the heights of humanist glory, Walter Hill, like the other children cast into prison, did not want to go to Virginia. The imprisoned boys and girls were far from convinced that their own lot would be improved by turning looms in Bridewell or tending tobacco in the Chesapeake, although they knew their labor would improve the lots of those who saw them into both places. They also knew that their souls would not be redeemed from sin by being sent “against their consciences” from one place of bondage, Bridewell, to another in Virginia. They also understood that their only “crime” had been their poverty, while the men who incarcerated them had committed a real crime by stealing their bodies. The young prisoners thus rejected, in the words of Samuel How, the “human learning”— or the humanist principles—that justified their enslavement as a legitimate means to enrich others. Consequently, before being dispatched beyond the seas, they staged one of the first risings against unfree colonial labor in the English Atlantic, turning on their Bridewell captors in what officials described as a “revolt.” Their insurgency can be understood now as the state itself understood it in the seventeenth century, as “sedition.” It can also be considered, alternatively, as a political act of poor young commoners struggling for their liberty. In a larger sense, the Bridewell rebellion illustrates how the inaugural epoch of English colonization opened a new chapter in the commonality’s ongoing battle to preserve its customary rights. Expansion into the Atlantic had called into being new forms of expropriation and new class-conscious relationships, all of which ultimately forced poor commoners to move beyond defending the commons themselves and the liberties that they had been afforded “time out of mind.” Now, colonial transportation forced them to defend their own bodies from being enslaved for the benefit of the propertied body politic.33 The Bridewell rebellion also highlighted a broader struggle over the rule of law, as no statute or common-law precedents provided for the forcible transportation of the poor into colonial servitude. In response, the City and the Virginia Company turned to the prerogative powers of the Privy Council, and more specifically Maurice Abbot’s brother George, the archbishop

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of Canterbury, who served on that august body. On January 31, 1620, partly under the auspices of the archbishop, the Privy Council issued an edict empowering the City and the Virginia Company to begin shipping impoverished children to the Chesapeake, even though, as the declaration cited, “divers” had proved “unwilling to be carried thither.” Coercion would indeed be necessary to “redeem . . . so many poor souls . . . from misery and ruin . . . putting them,” as Thomas Smith might have said, “in a condition of use and service for the state.” As Edwyn Sandys, a founder and treasurer of the Virginia Company, wrote, masterless children would now serve “under severe masters . . . [to] be brought to goodness” in America. So that this reformation work could continue unabated, the City government warned parents that they would be cut off from poor relief if they objected to the colonial transportation of their children.34 While the Privy Council’s decision hardly surprises, the question remains how the so-called civic solution to the problem of colonization actually worked out in Virginia, and particularly whether plantation servitude benefited the transported children. Statistics provide a clear, if not grim, answer. By 1622, 288 of the 300 young people shipped from Bridewell had died in the Chesapeake. Among the dead was Walter Hill. These children did not live long enough to testify to the transforming power of the cross, whether through the Word or through the cross-shaped scars that the overseers’ lash left on their backs. One of the transported children, Elizabeth Abbot, died after receiving five hundred blows of pious Christian discipline from her “severe master.” Overwork, poor diets, and disease killed many of the children, and others died even more violent deaths at the hands of Native Americans. On March 22, 1622, Opecanchanough led the Powhattan Confederacy in a horrific massacre of 347 colonists, about a third of the population, after drawing the conclusion that Chesapeake Indians faced extinction through land lost in the rapid expansion of the tobacco economy driven by Coleman Streeters Maurice Abbot, Thomas Wroth, and their fellow investors in the Virginia Company. Undeterred by Indian massacres, the militant Protestant paragon John Donne still maintained that if the “whole country,” meaning Virginia, “were but such a Bridewell, to force idle persons to work, it had a good use.”35 As Opecanchanough’s uprising, Irish resistance to plantation, the Bridewell rebellion, and the raft of popular early modern English insurgencies all attest, reformation work from above faced formidable obstacles around the Atlantic, a realization made even clearer through the resurgent power of Catholic Spain, which combined with problems at home made the godly increasingly anxious about the very future of the Protestant Reformation.36

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The Spanish policies of James VI, the Scottish monarch who had ascended to the English throne in 1603 as James I, made the godly anxious that England was wavering in its commitment to contain the expansion of international Catholicism. The 1604 peace James struck with King Phillip III of Spain, his plans to marry his heir Charles to the Spanish infanta, and his appointment of anti-Calvinist bishops smacked of Protestant backsliding if not outright apostasy. At the same time, Spain had plunged Europe into the sectarian carnage of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), while it continued to violently oppose English commercial incursions into its American dominions.37 In this scenario, not only English power but the cosmic destiny of humanity seemed to hang in the balance. Indeed, many saints read the Protestant Reformation’s progress, or lack thereof, according to apocalyptic prophecy, blaming the English king for England’s fall from grace as a providential instrument of worldwide reformation. Antichristian yokes seemed to multiply in England and around the globe, obstructing the passage of the people of God over the threshold of profane time and into the prophesied golden age of the Christian millennium, which would culminate in the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth.38 Militant English Protestants, inspired by the newly emergent Black Legend, equated the rise of the Spanish empire with the reign of Antichrist on earth, a line of thought that rendered English colonial expansion into a Protestant imperative. Indeed, Richard Hakluyt wrote his Discourse as the Black Legend materialized in the Protestant mind following the publication in English of Bartolemé de Las Casas’s Brief Narration of the Destruction of the Indies. Turning a Catholic critique of Spanish imperialism into a militant Protestant indictment of unqualified Catholic brutishness, Hakluyt wrote that England would strike a blow for civility, the saints, and the natural rights of “savages” suffering under Spanish despots. Repudiating Spanish “slaughters and murders of those peaceable, lowly, mild, and gentle” Indians, Protestant England would administer justice in its colonies without respect to “savage” and “civilized” persons. After enduring the “outrageous . . . Turkish cruelty” of the enslaving Spanish, Hakluyt predicted, the Indians of America would greet the English as liberators, much as when “men . . . tied as slaves” in the Turkish galleys “yell and cry with one voice liberta, liberta, as desirous of liberty or freedom.” England’s colonies, as Hakluyt wrote, would “enlarge the glory of the Gospel,” “plant sincere religion, and provide a safe and a sure place to receive people from all parts of the world that are forced to flee for the truth of God’s word.”39 Freed by Protestant militancy from deference to what they saw as a crypto-Catholic royal court, civic-minded English Protestants answered

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Hakluyt’s call to engage in “western planting” by forming what can be called an alternative foreign policy that competed with the crown’s. This sometimes took the form of turning misfortune into opportunity. Such a case occurred in 1609 when the ship Sea Venture, sailing with relief supplies for Jamestown, wrecked on the island of Bermuda, 640 miles off the coast of Cape Hatteras. The fate of the shipwrecked crew and colonists on the Atlantic island moved William Shakespeare, an investor in the Virginia Company, to publish a subtle meditation on the clash between “savagery” and “civilization” beyond the seas. He called his musings about this “brave new world” The Tempest.40 Virginia Company investors with more practical interests in Bermuda such as the earl of Warwick, his heir Robert Rich, and the Coleman Streeters Maurice Abbot and Thomas Wroth combined to found the Somers Islands (or Bermuda) Company. When Rich succeeded to the earldom in 1619, he promoted a plan to enrich Virginia and Bermuda by pillaging Spanish shipping in the Americas. In 1619 Warwick issued orders to Daniel Elfrith, captain of the Treasurer (named after the office Rich held in the Virginia Company), “to rob the King of Spain’s subjects in the West Indies.” The ensuing campaign of piracy, as events would reveal, worked toward resolving Virginia and Bermuda’s labor shortages. Following a raid on a Portuguese slave ship, the Treasurer deposited a group of “twenty and odd” captives in Virginia, an event that marked the opening scene of the long, tragic history of African enslavement in the future United States. The Treasurer’s consort ship, the Neptune, landed over a hundred more stolen Africans in Bermuda, where Warwick’s own properties dominated and where Abbot and Wroth also owned estates. As Elfrith’s exploits makes clear, Coleman Street saints stood to gain from the sale and labor of enslaved Africans, a profitable and exploitive enterprise derived from their initial investments in Atlantic piracy and colonization.41 But while stealing slaves reaped profits for these godly colonizers, piracy proved more dangerous for Warwick’s circle in England than it did for Captain Elfrith as he sailed the Atlantic. The earl had made an effort to legitimize his piratical designs through a letter of marque from the duke of Savoy, who patronized Christian pirates in the Mediterranean. But when news drifted back to London that Warwick and his supporters had embroiled themselves in high seas robbery and thus blackened the reputation of the Virginia Company, Warwick’s chief rival within the company leadership, Edwin Sandys, seized the opportunity to level the charge of piracy against the earl—not a light one, as Walter Raleigh’s 1618 execution for piracy on the Spanish Main remained fresh in the minds of all concerned.

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Coleman Street’s Abbot and Wroth did not blink, remaining steadfast in their support for Warwick amidst the intrigue and fratricide that plagued the colony’s founding brothers. Although the earl avoided Sir Walter’s fate, the dustup exacerbated the Virginia Company’s conflicted relationship with the Privy Council, which dissolved the company in 1624 and gave control of the colony to the crown.42 Despite the collapse of the company’s government, the oceanic pillaging sponsored by Abbot, Wroth, Warwick, and other colonialists established piracy as a primary means by which the godly would prop up the profitability of their plantations in the name of English power and its corollary, the progress of Protestantism around the Atlantic world.43 By trimming their sails with Warwick’s piratical slave-trading venture in 1619, the same year that they secured the Privy Council’s support for the transportation of the London poor into colonial servitude, Coleman Streeters Maurice Abbot and Thomas Wroth made pivotal contributions to the creation of the unfree labor regime in the English Atlantic. The bulk of Virginia’s founders wanted to get rich quick, and they soon realized that a colonial yeomanry working small tobacco farms could not produce the large yields necessary to maximize profits in a market where prices fell over time. Only a large, brutally disciplined, unfree plantation labor force could harvest enough tobacco to satisfy the greed of colonial merchants, planters, and financiers, a reality that elided English humanism’s caution against colonial projects designed for “present profit.” At the same time, however, the turn toward an increasingly severe unfree labor regime in Virginia reinforced the exploitative class hierarchies that English humanism embraced, particularly the links it made between the increase of the commonwealth, the advance of the Protestant Reformation, and the propertied people’s mastery of the unpropertied poor. Subjugation of the commoners around the Atlantic, to the point of transforming them into salable commodities, thus became a prerogative of the propertied people as read through the militant Protestant and capitalist imperatives that pervaded the spiritual and political economy of English humanism. P rof i t i n g from Caribbean piracy hardly made Abbot and Wroth outliers among the godly, for their venture with Warwick reflected the still prevalent view that there would be no “peace beyond the line” as long as Protestant Englishmen stirred abroad in the dominions of Antichrist. But while piracy might advance the Protestant Reformation in the colonial Atlantic, in England the same might be achieved through the promotion of Calvinism

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within a backsliding church, a program that contained dramatic political implications. As the Calvinist ideologue Dudley Fenner wrote, the Church of England’s constitution hardly resembled that of “the old Church of God.” Arbitrary innovations in church government enforced by iron-fisted bishops, in the view of England’s arch-Calvinist Protestants, threatened both the soul and the civil liberties of the people. Within the context of Reformation-era thought, the saints desired ideological parity between the commonwealth’s civil and ecclesiastical constitutions, each of which existed to defend the interdependent “bodies politic” of church and state against the potential of “slavish subjection” to spiritual and civil tyranny.44 In the early 1620s, Maurice Abbot, while serving on the vestry of St. Stephen’s parish, used his influence with his brother George, the archbishop of Canterbury, to turn the Coleman Street church into a citadel of godliness and liberty. With the archbishop’s help, the vestry purchased the impropriation of the parish from the London diocese. Now blessed with the privilege of electing its own ministers, the vestry could maintain a crucial degree of independence from George Montaigne, bishop of London, a committed opponent of the church’s Calvinist faction. The vestry elected John Davenport as pastor in 1624, viewing his preaching as well as his pecuniary interests in the Virginia Company as proof of his militant Protestant credentials.45 In a few short years, Davenport would come into conflict with the most powerful churchman in England, Archbishop William Laud, whose patron, Charles I, had ascended to the throne in 1625. Puritans believed that Laud’s anti-Calvinist “innovations” violated the Protestant fundamentals of the English Church, although Laud himself sought only to restore the “beauty of holiness” to a Protestant church that had alienated much of the faithful through bare-bones Calvinism. Laud’s godly critics also condemned his alleged Arminianism, which they believed privileged a “popish” covenant of works over the “covenant of grace.” But as Christopher Hill once observed, Arminianism was “an enemy word” like puritan. Laud himself said, “I have nothing to do to defend Arminius,” the Dutch theologian for whom the body of religious thought was named. Nevertheless, his enemies used the label to assassinate the character of his Protestant integrity.46 Laud quickly realized he had a formidable foe in Davenport, whom his predecessor Montaigne had already called a “factious and popular” minister who could “draw after him great congregations and assemblies of common and mean people.” While in outward conformity with the church, Davenport preached a fiery gospel of opposition to English crypto-Catholicism. Davenport’s message clearly resonated with the residents of Coleman Street Ward, who as-

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sembled in such large crowds to hear him that the vestrymen ordered new galleries built in the nave to hold the overflowing throngs. Although these sermons electrified congregations and inspired enthusiasm for Protestant extremism, Davenport held no illusions about the increasing risks he ran as a high-profile puritan ministering to one of London’s largest parishes. In a 1628 letter to his patron Lady Vere, Davenport wrote that he anticipated “a fierce storm from the enraged spirit” of Laud, and “ere long” could “expect to be deprived of my pastoral charge in Coleman Street.”47 Had Laud known more about the activities of Davenport and the vestrymen of St. Stephen’s, he certainly would have stripped the vicar of his living in 1628. A year before, supported by the earl of Warwick, Davenport, along with his parishioners Maurice Abbot, Owen Rowe, and William Spurstowe, assisted in the formation of an underground organization within the church called the “feoffees of impropriaton” to assist other parishes in obtaining puritan ministers. Led by Davenport and three other famous London divines, Thomas Gataker, William Gouge, and Hugh Peter, the feoffees raised funds, an impressive sum of £8,073, with which they purchased parochial vacancies for godly ministers. Unlike the separatists who broke communion with the Church of England and fled to New England in 1620 to found the colony of New Plymouth, the feoffees aimed to transform the Church of England from within. The feoffees felt that a puritan ministry could be a potent weapon in the war against the internal Antichrist, where sound doctrine preached from English pulpits would deliver the nation from the superstitious snares set by crypto-Catholic saboteurs like Laud. Their plan achieved its desired effect, at least in the case of fifteen-year-old William Kiffin, a London apprentice whose conversion experience began after he heard a sermon at St. Antholin’s preached by Thomas Foxley, a beneficiary of the feoffees. About a decade later, Kiffin, who became perhaps the most important Baptist preacher in England, played an instrumental part in the conversion of another young apprentice, the Coleman Street conventicler and future Leveller John Lilburne.48 The feoffees’ enterprise created commonwealths in miniature, where puritans fashioned their just principles of church government around the concept of popular sovereignty. Power flowed from the bottom up in this model, where an elected vestry in turn elected a minister that best suited the collective religious conscience of the parish rather than the political and theological predilections of the reigning bishop. Moreover, since the congregation once in possession of the incumbency held the right to both propose and dispose of elected ministers, the parish government retained

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sovereignty over its own affairs, a constitutional mechanism designed to protect the collective conscience of the parishioners as the ultimate sovereign power in the parish itself. The spiritual governance of the congregation thus depended upon the continued consent of its members. In this way, the puritan ideal of good government stood utterly at odds with the what saints saw as Laud’s “innovations,” which in terms of both their theology and their heavy-handed enforcement smacked of “Romish” absolutism.49 Set in this light, it’s hardly surprising that most of the godly supported Parliament’s effort to curtail the royal prerogative during the 1620s, an effort that culminated in the Petition of Right controversy (1628). During that decade, forced loans and other “innovations” calculated to raise crown revenue contradicted the humanist emphasis on the rule of law and struck at the heart of the ancient constitution, the unwritten but still very real political institution increasingly revered by the English as the bulwark behind their celebrated traditions of liberty.50 Laud’s tone-deaf responses to the attempts to constrain the king’s prerogative only exacerbated the political tension between Parliament and the crown. The bishop called Magna Carta an “obscure” charter borne from “usurpation and . . . fostered and shown to the world by rebellion.” He also condemned resistance to the forced loan as a plot by “puritans” to overthrow the monarchy. Laud thus attempted to paint the king’s opponents, who certainly ranged beyond the puritan camp, as popular seditionists steeped in heresy. Defending Charles’s promiscuous use of his discretionary power, Laud launched uncompromising attacks against the king’s parliamentary opponents, charging wrongly that they opposed the royal prerogative in toto. Laud’s misstep here raised the stakes in the battle over the crown’s controversial policies, turning Parliament’s attempt to reaffirm what it perceived as its preexisting liberties into an ideological conflict and constitutional crisis.51 In the course of the Petition of Right controversy, the common lawyer Sir John Eliot argued that the crisis lay not in raising “monies” but in “the propriety of goods. . . . The law gives everyone his own. Rights of all sorts must be kept . . . that ceasing, all propriety ceaseth. The ancient law of England, the declaration of Magna Charta and other statutes, say the subject is not to be burdened . . . yet we see . . . the law . . . is fallen into the chaos of higher power.” Sir Robert Phelips warned that the “arbitrary discretion” the king employed in imprisoning those who opposed his revenue schemes threatened the propriety his subjects held in their very persons, “for if we be subject to perpetual imprisonment we have neither our lives or our bodies free.”

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Parliament also discussed another violation of bodily propriety, military impressments, though not in the way that we might expect. Charles had forced England’s freemen to quarter conscripted soldiers, the “poor, beggarly” Englishmen and the damned “Irish” and Scottish “Red Shanks,” decried in civil society as armed, desperate, and degenerate; on the loose and dangerous, they were the members of the commonality “fit only to die in ditches.”52 MPs by and large supported conscription itself but lamented the social threat conscripts posed as well as the costs that freemen incurred by boarding them. But as it turned out, like colonial transportation, impressment had no legal precedent in common or statute law, which worried the self-proclaimed Herculean saviors of England such as Maurice Abbot’s friend and fellow MP Sir Dudley Digges. Popular knowledge of liberty from conscription, as Digges argued at Westminster, would prove dangerous to the interests of the commonwealth. “I beseech you,” Digges begged his fellow MPs, to “cover the power of the subjects . . . let it [not] be openly spoke abroad, that mean men may not know it, which perhaps if they should would be inconvenient.” Inconvenient indeed: the kingdom could not grow in strength without the propertied people’s power, devolved in trust to the crown and Parliament, to expropriate the bodily liberties of poor commoners for military labor. “The specter of the commonality” thus lurked in the shadows of the Petition of Right debates, as MPs struggled to protect the proprietary liberties of civil society, all the while concealing the liberty under the law that poor commoners possessed over their own bodies.53 Ironically, Coleman Street’s most prominent puritan, Maurice Abbot, seemed indifferent to these constitutional issues, preferring instead to pursue his personal quarry, George Villiers, the duke of Buckingham, during the impeachment proceedings that Sir Dudley Digges and the young colonialist John Pym prosecuted against Villiers in 1626.54 Abbot, however, did act conscientiously if not drastically in October 1628. That month the merchant personally led a crew of his East India Company colleagues in an attempt to recover a cargo of currants that the crown had impounded in a warehouse. Although Abbot seemed disinclined to scruple constitutional issues, he liberated his conscience to protect his profits, freeing his mind so that his assets would follow.55 L i k e Maurice Abbot, sections of the London commonality resorted to direct, violent action during the Petition of Right debates, but unlike Abbot, they acted on principles more immediate to the common good than to maximizing mercantile profits. On Coleman Street in May 1628, the crowd

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caught up with Dr. John Lambe, known as a confidant of the duke of Buckingham and, if widespread rumors were correct, a practitioner of black magic. Convicted but later exonerated of sorcery and child rape, Lambe had a shadowy friendship with the duke that only further blackened his image in the eyes of the commons. In the popular view, the young courtier had corrupted the even younger king with his alleged homosexual hedonism. He was also rumored to be working secretly on behalf of Spanish interests. A year earlier, the duke’s incompetence had cost the nation more than his supposed treachery, having caused the deaths of 3,895 of the 6,884 troops whom he had commanded in the disastrous expedition to the French fort on the Île de Ré. By associating Buckingham with Lambe, the people could construe the duke as something worse than a traitor; he had become, in the eyes of many, evil incarnate. As thousands converged amidst bells and bonfires on Tower Hill after Parliament denounced Buckingham during the Petition of Right debates, another crowd made up mostly of apprentices and sailors surprised Lambe as he left a theater. The mob chased Lambe down Coleman Street and into the Windmill Tavern, where the doctor hired another group of sailors to keep the crowd at bay. These mariners soon melted off, perhaps joining the mob, leaving Lambe to the people’s mercy. Pulling him out of the tavern and onto the street, Lambe’s tormentors beat the aged man to death with stones and cudgels, holding the duke accountable for his corrupt misdeeds by killing the doctor. Thus expectations for reformation could be articulated brutally in the language of political violence, although verse also worked well for the Coleman Street crowd, which joined Lambe’s murder with Parliament’s denunciation of Buckingham by way of a provocative billet nailed to a post: Who rules the Kingdom? The King Who rules the King? The Duke Who rules the Duke? The Devil

The billet closed with a political threat aimed at the Stuart Court: Let the duke look to it; for they intend shortly to use him worse than they did the doctor; and if things be not shortly reformed, they will work a reformation themselves.

Through both street violence and written proclamations, the mob in Coleman Street Ward unconstitutionally constituted themselves, through their own authority, as part of “the people” or civil society, acting on behalf of the common good and the country’s virtue in the midst of England’s greatest constitutional crisis to date.56

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In Portsmouth later that August, Lieutenant John Felton kept the Coleman Street crowd’s promise to hold the duke accountable to the people. That month the duke prepared English forces for another expedition to France, although mutinies and riots by impressed soldiers and sailors in the port city signaled the commonality’s hostility to being violently forced into the service of the king. The morning after Buckingham had enraged his troops by executing a sailor for “a little sauciness,” the thirty-six-year-old nobleman met a violent death at the end of Felton’s knife, one he wielded with the bitter memory of the comrades he had lost on the Île de Ré. While Felton could have escaped in the panic and confusion that quickly enveloped the scene, he offered himself to the duke’s shocked retinue, saying, “I am the man. Here I am.” When asked why he killed the duke, Felton responded that the controversy over the Petition of Right revealed to him that doing away with Buckingham would “do the country a great service.” For Felton, the Petition of Right, a copy of which he kept on his person during the assassination, figured as an inspired reassertion of ancient liberties, proving that the English had rediscovered their hearts, wherein the substance of real liberty resided in faith to God. As the historian James Holstun has argued, Felton’s reference to conscience and his literal connection to the Petition of Right as he thrust his assassin’s dagger made him an early modern Ehud, typed after the Old Testament Israelite who avenged the lost liberties of God’s people by burying a blade deep into the swollen belly of the gluttonous tyrant Nebuchadnezzar.57 Felton bore Ehud’s dagger to defend the virtue of the English people and to reawaken their accountability to God, to the public good, and to the liberty for which their ancestors had sacrificed much blood. It seems to have worked, both in the way that the lieutenant intended and to the opposite effect, as a stream of pamphlets, poems, songs, libels, and jests, both in praise and scorn of Felton’s deed, attests. While his opponents demonized him as the crazed fanatical spawn of the malignant, many-headed multitude, his supporters saw Felton as a virtuous model of the public-spirited tyrannicide. Alluding to the classical republican tradition, one writer observed that “Felton’s valor great did prove a Roman spirit,” an inspiration to those who defended the lieutenant’s actions in the name of their own liberties. The English, of course, drew on more than one political tradition to express their love of liberty. As Felton made his way through Kingston on Thames to face his executioner in London, an elderly woman called out, “God bless thee, little David!” Goliath, who had once towered over the Israelites, had fallen before the people, who would inherit the kingdom he coveted. In the anonymous poem “The Duke Returned Again,” written allegedly by a

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veteran of the expedition to Re, Buckingham looms as the “Achan of our English Israel,” Achan having brought the curse of God upon Israel by corruptly enriching himself on wartime pillage. Felton thus became Joshua to Felton’s Achan, as Joshua put Achan to death to restore providential favor to Israel. Scripture, which produced the most popular dialect in the language of early modern English politics, provided a wealth of political metaphors through which to couch the assassination. All across England, seditious libels linked the Coleman Street mob’s killing of Lambe to Felton’s killing of Buckingham, casting the events into a singular defense of the people’s virtue against the debauched Duke and his dependent. One, simply titled, “Epitaph,” read: He’s gone all say O but whither? birds of a wing fly together Lambe was sent a place to outlook and where Lambe is, there’s the Duke.

They were in hell, as we find out later in the rhyme, sent there by the work of their assassins on Coleman Street and in Portsmouth. During the Petition of Right debates, through assassinations, crowd actions, mutinies, and “seditious libels,” the commonality created a part for itself in the high politics of the early Stuart era, with the Coleman Street crowd becoming both agents and symbols of the commonality’s popular seditions. Moreover, by undertaking reformation work of this sort, commoners in port cities produced a radical politics of the streets, docks, and printing press that would be present at the making of the English Revolution.58 After effectively rejecting the Petition of Right, Charles dissolved the short-lived Parliament of 1629 and embarked upon an-eleven year “personal rule” without calling Lords or Commons into session; he also increased William Laud’s power in 1633 by appointing him to replace the sometime puritan sympathizer George Abbot as archbishop of Canterbury. Making matters worse for the saints, Charles also placed Laud atop the prerogative courts of Star Chamber and High Commission.59 Through Star Chamber, Laud targeted the court’s puritan foes, infamously making a gruesome example in 1637 of three leading dissenters: the lawyer William Prynne, the minister Henry Burton, and the physician Dr. John Bastwick. During the bloody proceedings, the young apprentice John Lilburne stood pale and stricken at the feet of Burton while he suffered at the pillory. Lilburne admired Burton’s Calvinist tracts and had visited him in prison before bearing

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witness to his gruesome suffering. A year later Lilburne himself would be scourged through the streets and pilloried in New Palace Yard, convicted of smuggling Burton’s millenarian indictment of the court, A Letanie, into England. The tracts that landed Lilburne in jail came from Amsterdam, products of the puritan press in exile run by John Canne, a former member of Samuel How’s church. Lilburne spent the next three years in the Fleet Prison, after which he moved to Moorefields, perhaps to be nearer to London’s hub of puritan dissent in Coleman Street Ward.60 The Coleman Street brewer and merchant Isaac Pennington was also part of the teeming crowd that watched the “martyrs’” suffer at the pillory. To “the great Star Chamber business,” he wrote, “I am both an eye and an earwitness.” The scourging of Prynne, Burton, and Bastwick marked the apex of Caroline puritan persecution, which from the late 1620s through the 1630s had hit Pennington and his Coleman Street allies particularly hard, dealing a severe blow to the London godly’s counteroffensive against the Laudian ascendancy. Experience with persecution had been “the cause of much dejection among many good and loyal subjects,” so much so that Pennington recognized it as the reason that many saints had decided to “fly and make many more [to] think of providing for their safety in other places.” The colonies, as Pennington implied, were becoming places of refuge, a changing dynamic from earlier in the century when colonizers perceived them mainly as sites of religious, political, and economic opportunity.61 Laud’s ascent had quickly led John Davenport to conclude that his days in England were numbered. As the minister weighed his options, his friend John Cotton of Boston, Lincolnshire, hid out on Coleman Street, where Davenport sheltered him from Laud’s inquisitors. During his stay over the summer of 1633, the Reverend Cotton helped convince Davenport to abandon conformity with the church, as his work with the feoffees had made this impossible to do honestly, let alone safely. Following Cotton’s advice, Davenport and many of his closest devotees at St. Stephen’s chose exile over persecution, leaving for Holland later that year. They would not remain long among the Dutch. We will see in the next chapter how Davenport moved his flock to New England, where his path would again cross that of Cotton, who by then had become one of the Bay Colony’s most influential clerics. To replace their popular pastor, the St. Stephen’s vestry elected John Goodwin, an MA and fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, an institution whose illustrious clerical alumni suggest that it served as a seminary of sorts for puritan divines.62 For his nonconformity with Laudian reform, Goodwin spent much of his first decade on Coleman Street confronting the

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archbishop’s official rebukes. The divine found himself before the Court of High Commission in 1633. Two years later, Goodwin again faced Laud’s inquisitors for a sermon that contradicted a church canon, earning him a spot on the archbishop’s blacklist.63 Wh i l e persecution could pull the saints together in common cause to honor their martyrs or, more radically, to remove to America as colonial exiles, the common experience of being hunted and harassed by their enemies could not bridge the gaps dividing them. Their alliances always remained tenuous; the godly persecuted each other, both in England and in the colonies. Facing the prospect of increasing marginalization and degradation within their own church, the puritan clergy and their many supporters within puritan parishes tried to ingratiate themselves with the Courts of Star Chamber and High Commission by informing on the antinomians in their midst. They did so under the mistaken impression that they could shift the focus of the bishops and the prerogative courts away from themselves, the ostensible standard bearers of godliness, and onto the antinomians, the most obvious heretics within their midst. The internal puritan purge began in 1627, when the Court of High Commission condemned the antinomian boxmaker John Ethrington to the pillory based on information supplied by the puritan clergyman Stephen Denison. Ethrington suffered in his chains at St. Paul’s Cross, enduring the additional agony of hearing Denison drone on and on in a long-winded litany of his antinomian errors. One wonders whether the pillory or the homily was more agonizing for Ethrington. The antinomian Peter Shaw’s 1629 trial proved the most explosive, as Shaw’s adversaries Stephen Denison, Henry Burton, and a host of other puritan divines turned on him in the midst of High Commission’s investigation of their own strident Calvinism.64 Samuel How and dozens of other spiritists fell victim to the antinomian purge in April 1632. Laud’s inquisitors burst through the door of a waterfront house near Blackfriars Church, where they caught How and his friends assembled in a conventicle, listening to John Lathrop preach. Most of those apprehended, including How, Lathrop, Susan Eaton (widow of the antinomian preacher John Eaton), and the button-maker Samuel Eaton, spent the next two years in prison on order of High Commission. Eaton refused to provide High Commission with her husband’s influential antinomian manuscript, from which Lathrop was likely reading when the authorities broke in on the meeting. High Commission sent the godly prisoners to the full range of London’s jails, which among others included the Clink, the

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Gatehouse, Newgate, the Wood Street, and Poultry Compters adjacent to Coleman Street Ward, as well as the Fleet and Bridewell. As some saints discovered, imprisonment for erroneous doctrine could end in death, due to the appalling conditions in which London’s predatory jailers kept their charges. 65 Descriptions of the state of affairs within these filthy holes explain their traumatizing and often lethal impact on those forced to endure their horrors. One inmate, Geffray Mynshul, described the typical English prison as a place to bury men alive . . . it is a microcosmos, a little world of woe; it is a map of misery . . . it turns a rich man into a beggar and leaves a poor man desperate. . . . It is a place that hath more diseases predominant in it than the pest house at plague time and it stinks more than the Lord Mayors doghouse. . . . It is a purgatory which doth afflict a man with more miseries than he ever reaped pleasures. . . . In a word it is the very idea of all miseries and torments. It converts joy into sorrow, riches into poverty, and ease into discontentments.66

Seventeenth-century jail conditions quite frequently transformed prison sentences into death sentences, particularly for political and religious prisoners forced to endure torture.67 Return Hebdon died in prison after he, unlike his spiritual mentor, the antinomian John Traske, refused to recant after both had been tortured and imprisoned by Star Chamber in 1617, the sentence passed down by Lord Chancellor Francis Bacon, who must have felt some Herculean pleasure in lopping off two antinomian heads of the many-headed hydra. John Traske, imprisoned again in 1636, died in his cell the same year, and his wife Dorothy died as a prisoner in the Gatehouse a decade later. Samuel Eaton, arrested with Samuel How in 1632, died in Newgate in 1639. Samuel How, thrown back in jail the same year as Eaton, died the following year. The Laudians clearly meant business, and their collaborators within the puritan community stood complicit in the physical suffering and even the deaths of the antinomians they helped to intern in London’s squalid dungeons.68 The life-and-death stakes of London’s antinomian controversy conveys the import, to say nothing of the divisive intensity, of this doctrinal dispute within the godly community, one that revolved largely around the nature of the covenant of grace. All Protestants believed that the covenant of works deluded the faithful into believing that their own merit might get them into heaven. In contrast, the covenant of grace made for “a fair and easy way to heaven.” Faith alone, instrumentalized by God’s omnipotent grace, saved—a Protestant conviction that gave the burden of salvation back to

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God, whose mercy alone could save a soul from hell. But antinomians directly contested the character of the covenant of grace. Although their views here conflicted with other saints and brought the very character of Protestant theology into question, recent research has borne out that antinomians were far from a fringe constituency. Within this fractious context, anxieties and internecine psychodramas accompanied the heady work of reformation, as the saints simply could not let the divisions within their own ranks rest undisturbed.69 John Eaton, called the patriarch of English antinomianism by Archbishop Laud, ran secret gatherings of puritan dissenters called conventicles in private homes in Coleman Street Ward and elsewhere in London. In these gatherings, Eaton preached the consensus puritan view that the unconverted needed to be awakened to their sins. Through this process of “sanctification” true knowledge of sin would be revealed by love for the “moral law” in scripture—Eaton likened this epiphany to being “slain by the law.” Shaken out of sinful sloth and slumber by the “thundering and lightning” of good preaching, the unconverted would be transformed into true believers by proceeding through faith to open up their hearts to God’s life-giving grace. According to most puritan clergy, however, believers must continually live in fear of their past and present failures to uphold the moral law, reflecting on their sinfulness, to avoid the blinding pride that might lead to damnation. Herein lay the pitfall for Eaton and the antinomians, who believed that the clergy’s emphasis on the moral law kept believers locked in a state of mortal terror, with obsessive consciousness of personal sin sinking them into an abyss of self-doubt and self-loathing. Thus the believer might slip from hope and descend into a hell on earth, tortured to a tragic point when, consumed by their doom, they became incapable of accepting the free grace that God offered them. The clergy’s emphasis on “preparation” for “sanctification” kept the faithful living in a paradoxical state: their quest for assurance plunged them into perpetual conflict with the will of God, who, as antinomians stressed, desired the salvation of souls and not their damnation. Eaton and other antinomians called the puritan clergy’s misplaced emphasis on the moral law “legalism”; in opposition to its “accusations, terrors, and condemnings for conscience of sin” antinomians exhorted “a fullness of faith,” to conquer the “fearing [of ] . . . anything that goes about to make us afraid, molest, make us sad, or to work any trouble against us.” Eaton and those who took up his doctrine wanted to comfort the saints and empower them to replace self-loathing obedience to the law with “the joyful running in the ways of the law.” The saint’s conscience,

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liberated from coerced adherence to the Decalogue, would nonetheless embrace it as a guide to righteous conduct. For antinomians, God was love, not angst. Their gospel of free grace illuminated the depth of God’s love and his sovereign power to free his creation from all antichristian bondage. As the late historian Christopher Hill wrote, the purpose of antinomianism was to “liberate the consciences” of the saints.70 By 1639, Coleman Street’s puritan eminence John Goodwin had come to the conclusion that the antinomian Samuel How, far from liberating the consciences of his followers, had sent them into a spiritual free fall. Goodwin invited How to openly dispute his beliefs with him, believing that a victory over the cobbler would do much to contain the wider antinomian menace. The minister certainly could count on the wealthy merchants who dominated St. Stephen’s vestry, not to mention the entire godly clerical establishment. How clearly recognized the powerful forces arrayed against him, writing that the antinomians assumed the role of David to the Goodwin party’s Goliath. But as How surely knew, that battle had ended with the weak overcoming the strong.71 Goodwin arranged a series of meetings with How that took place in the pastor’s townhouse on Coleman Street. How later wrote from prison that for his part “it was not my intent at all to meddle in this argument,” although he felt compelled to respond after Goodwin threw down the gauntlet. Goodwin chose a scriptural passage, 2 Peter 3:16, as the ground for disputation. The text reflects upon an early church controversy regarding the authority to preach and concludes that the “unlearned” are “unable to wrest” “things hard to be understood” from the “epistles” and “other scriptures”; their resulting mistakes, as the verse has it, worked “unto their own destruction.” How, however, refused to defer to Goodwin’s patronizing argument; he saw himself as a pastor in his own right and therefore stood his doctrinal ground.72 At the meeting, How confidently stated that Goodwin had misread 2 Peter 3:16; it did not, as Goodwin claimed, reserve to ordained clergy a godly sovereignty to monopolize the preaching of God’s Word. According to his own subsequent account of the affair, How reported that “to their great grief and discontent . . . [I] was labouring with all the power and might that God assisted me with,” to “utterly to cast down, grind to powder, and to blow” their arguments “away with the Word of God, with the breath of his mouth.” The “human learning of the clergy,” How declared directly to Goodwin, “. . . is enmity to God . . . [it] crosseth and opposeth simplicity of his way in the dispensation of the glorious mystery of the gospel.” He

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continued that the “Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of Glory without respect to persons,” rendered even “weak and contemptible . . . messengers . . . [with] power.” Through “much plainness, and demonstration of the spirit,” the sovereignty of the Holy Ghost could lay just claim to rule over the “humane learning and wisdom which the men of this throne set up, and themselves.” King Jesus, through his coregent the Holy Spirit, had set up another throne on earth, one that the mean and low-born like How would inherent as sovereign agents of reformation. How remembered that when he “delivered this point” it met with “derision, and contempt, and table-talk” from Goodwin’s party. In particular he recalled how Goodwin, who had “put me on this exercise having excepted against it . . . with much passion manifested his great dislike thereof before many witnesses.” But How remained unmoved and unimpressed and soon left Goodwin’s Coleman Street manse for his more humble abode on Long Alley in Moorfields.73 On his way home, How must have reflected bitterly that Goodwin, a Cambridge man, having invited him to debate, had refused to engage with the merits of his argument. Instead, the minister dismissed his points by mocking How’s lack of education and mean and obscure class standing. The very men who called him brother had perverted the Word and will of their heavenly Father into a manifestation of their carnal pride and arrogance. Angered at such treatment, How decided to widen the circle of conflict, to bring it out from behind closed doors and into the open, on his turf this time, among the commonality in a public house on Coleman Street. Accordingly, he invited Goodwin and other divines to come to his church at the Nag’s Head tavern. There, “one hundred and above” people would gather to behold the rare sight of an antinomian in a tavern preaching down to the puritan clergy, who had used their own pulpits to rain down judgment on the radicals for the better part of the preceding decade. For How, Goodwin and the divines who accepted his invitation represented the traitors who supplied High Commission with the intelligence that had led to his and his comrades’ stays in London’s miserable dungeons. There their health had been ruined, their families impoverished, their reputations blackened, and in the worst cases, their souls taken by an early death. How knew that speaking to an open audience in Coleman Street would draw the further attention of High Commission, which had already robbed him of two years of his life. How seems to have weighed the decision carefully to avoid attracting the unwanted attention of spies from the prerogative courts. The cobbler announced that he would reply to Goodwin at the Nag’s Head but gave only one day’s notice to his prospective audience.

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But in deciding to move forward at all, How seems to have imputed the wisdom of his fellow antinomian Return Hebdon, who wrote from prison before his death there that “this faith will encourage the Christian to enter the conflict in the love of Christ and without fear to confess his name. . . . [These] Christians . . . there is in them a mind and spirit to overcome all the pains and torments of the body and to triumph over all the power and authority of men and mortality.” As I noted at the outset of this chapter, How launched his Nag’s Head sermon with a diatribe against the puritan clergy’s monopoly of power and put lay preachers on an equal footing with their parochial peers. His critique of human learning here did not constitute an anti-intellectual diatribe; How recognized that higher learning could be put to proper use in its proper sphere. But he dismantled the puritan clergy’s insistence on “human learning” as a means to the ministry, laying out a clearly Eatonite argument that those “taught by the spirit, without humane learning, are such persons as rightly understand the Word”; the Spirit, in turn, rejected legalistic employments of the moral law, which was no use for salvation, since through faith in God “we are complete in him, that is perfect and full in him.”74 But in the tract How later wrote in prison to flesh out the social context of his anticlericalism, he turned his sermon into a social protest on behalf of the poor. “Learned wise men” “count . . . the common people accursed” because they failed to fear the moral “law.” But How was not interested in the petty morals of old men. He countered that God had not ordained the wealthy, wise, and temporally powerful to rule the world—the Lord looked upon the trappings of their authority as “dross and dung.” Those of “the lower sort,” the “pedlar, tinker, chimney sweeper, or cobbler,” recognized that the “wretched poor miserable blind and naked” were really the “carnal” rich, spiritually impoverished through their own pride and the seductions of their ministers who chased after “filthy lucre.” Here How might have been channeling the words of his Coleman Street comrade Rice Boye, who, inspired by the persistent pleas of the London poor, titled his 1635 pamphlet The Importunate Beggar, writing that the lust of the rich kept them always in search of increase, while poor saints, satisfied with “meat and raiment” for body and soul, would do God’s real work in the world, emulating Christ, who “took on the form of a servant” to the afflicted and oppressed. Through faith and wisdom brought about through the “sufficiency of the spirit,” the godly commonality who followed preachers like How believed that they would inherit the kingdom of God on earth.75 In this way How took the antinomian controversy with the covenant of

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works and made it a social gospel to liberate consciences from the conventions of “carnal” power. In claiming to order the world in God’s image, the wealthy and powerful actually defiled it by robbing the poor of their freedom, placing them in literal and metaphorical prisons that destroyed the mind, body, and soul. The “humane learning” used to justify this temporal order “was “not fit for Christ’s church but for Egypt and Babylon,” where the children of God were enslaved. Investing their holiness in “honors, riches,” and “credit,” the powerful who ruled the world around them became “carnal . . . vessels of wrath.” They were “prepared to destruction; therefore they drive all to the same end,” much as Maurice Abbot and Thomas Wroth, drawing on the “human learning” articulated by commonwealth writers such as Thomas Smith, had driven children from the City into colonial bondage and early death, deluded by the notion that their captives could be redeemed by the moral law as administered by whip-wielding overseers on American plantations. But as How observed, “Moses forsook the treasures of Egypt of which human learning was chief.” Typing the captive poor as Mosaic liberators, How believed that they could lead the children of God out of bondage and into freedom through the leveling ethos of antinomianism.76 With this public proclamation of his antinomian liberation theology, How knew the authorities would condemn him as a blasphemous fanatic, if not a seditious libeler. The cobbler also he knew that his confrontation with Goodwin could lead to his death in prison, as it tragically did; he could not have known that his sermon, published six times over the course of the next two decades, would become a point of reference for revolutionaries around the English Atlantic. Perhaps How might have been most pleased that his old adversary turned republican-revolutionary, John Goodwin, would one day listen to lay preachers expound the gospel in his own schismatic church on Coleman Street. T h e Coleman Street godly worked for reformation in local, national, and global settings—multiple yet interconnected contexts that brought puritans into conflict with one another even as they joined in common cause against the religious and political policies of the Stuart dynasty. In reaction to the perceived apostasy of the Stuart Court, Coleman Street’s elite publicspirited puritans engaged in Atlantic piracy and colonization to promote a militant Protestant, anti-Spanish foreign policy that would prove more personally lucrative than the one envisioned by the crown. Even godly efforts aimed at domestic social reform assumed Atlantic horizons through forced

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transportation of the poor into plantation bondage, a so-called civic solution to English problems colonial and domestic. The transportation policy originated in a strain of humanist political thought that translated easily into an early political economy of colonization, interrelating the common good, the increase of the commonwealth, and the glory of Protestant England to mastery of the poor, protection of liberty (property) under the law, and profitable commercial expansion and colonization in the Atlantic and beyond. Linking Maurice Abbot and Thomas Wroth to the formation of this forced transportation policy as well as to the slave-raiding ventures sponsored by their piratical ally the earl of Warwick, we see how their class-conscious, profit-driven, militant Protestant humanism made them complicit in the rise of multiple forms of slavery in the English Atlantic. But as Walter Hill and the Bridewell rebels demonstrated in December 1619, the commonality continued, as they had for at least a century, to act in conscious resistance to their political enslavement, which had crossed the line into economic bondage, an innovation in early modern English statecraft that required the intervention of the Privy Council for enforcement. Mixing the sacred and profane beyond the confines of Bridewell, the commonality via the London crowd, especially active on Coleman Street, invited itself onto the main stage of national politics during the Petition of Right debate. Connecting the murder of Dr. Lambe with the assassination of the duke of Buckingham, the crowd portrayed the killings as capital executions by the commons to preserve their sovereign liberties and reform the commonwealth. Forced underground by the ascent of William Laud and the prerogative courts, John Davenport and his allies on Coleman Street and throughout the godly movement moved more moderately in their own conflicts with the Stuart church and state; through the feoffees of impropriation, they connected concepts of good government to congregational sovereignty, creating a “body politic” to advance England’s social and religious reformation through puritan preaching. But through the teachings of John Eaton, Coleman Street’s antinomians, as part of the increasingly politicized schism within the puritan underground, still rejected what they saw as the corruption of the moral law perpetrated by Davenport, Goodwin, and most of the godly clergy. While Eaton condemned the clergy’s terroristic use of the moral law for the injury it did to the spirits of individuals, How condemned it as an unholy prop for an entirely corrupt social order that, contradicting the egalitarian “sufficiency of the Spirit,” kept the poor in “Egypt,” or in bondage. Calling for the abolition of the clergy’s preaching prerogative as a means to protect the saints from the arbitrary exercise of power, How held

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out the wisdom of the poor as the key to reformation in England and the world, a sacred vision that, in ideological terms, overlapped with the prolific insurgencies that the early modern English commonalty had commissioned in its own name. Flowing from two decades of antilegalist preaching in a puritan underground that ran straight through Coleman Street Ward, Samuel How’s sermon at the Nag’s Head moved the Eatonites beyond private venues of puritan disputation and into literal public houses, bringing the hidden world of the conventicle into the open. How’s exhortations to the Nag’s Head congregation thus helped transform antinomianism into a public vehicle of social criticism on the eve of the English Revolution. In the next chapter we will follow the progress of the factious godly beyond the seas to the Americas, where many of the same conflicts plaguing the saints on Coleman Street would continue in the colonial commonwealths of the English Atlantic.

chapter two R

Colonization and Its Discontents The English Atlantic before the English Revolution

e a r ly on an April morning in 1637, Lieutenant Robert Seeley crept up a wooded New England hillside that overlooked the Mystic River. Reaching the summit as the sky lightened, Seeley and his fellow officers spied a wooden palisade wherein close to seven hundred Pequot Indians slept. Dividing their force, Captain John Underhill led his company into the fort’s northern entrance while Lieutenant Seeley and Captain John Mason took their soldiers through the southern port. But while entering the fort, Seeley became entangled in some thick underbrush and made so much noise trying to free himself that he startled the fort’s guard dogs, which erupted into a chorus of frenzied barks and howls. A moment later, Seeley’s head snapped back violently. A Pequot arrow had pierced his brow, lodging just above his left eye. Racing into the fray, Captain Mason pulled the arrow from his stricken friend’s forehead and began urging the rest of the men forward, beckoning with his sword to the fort. As Seeley sank to the ground, he may have thought twice about having left his home in Coleman Street Ward for the hazards of life in a new world. Once inside the fort, Seeley’s comrades set upon a wigwam, where they furiously slew seven Indians with knives, muskets, and swords. Panting for breath from the bloody work, Captain Mason reassembled his men on the main street of the stockade. There he declared that since “we should never kill them after that manner . . . we must burn them.” After touching firebrands to the matted roofs of the wigwams, Mason led his men out of the rising inferno and encircled the palisade with the aid of Underhill’s troops. As Mason later wrote, “When the fort was thoroughly fired . . . the Indians 45

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ran as men most dreadfully amazed. And indeed such a dreadful terror did the almighty let fall upon their spirits, that they would fly from us and run into the very flames, where many of them perished . . . some of them climbing to the top of the palizado” before being consumed by fire. The soldiers shot or hacked to death those who did not burn alive in the fort. According to Mason’s estimate, in all “some six to seven hundred” Pequots perished amidst the screams, smoke, and flames at Fort Mystic. The Pequots had once stood between the settlers, the fur trade, and the fertile farmland of the Connecticut River Valley. This would all change after the bloodletting alongside the Mystic River, a tragic event that set the tone for a vicious summer campaign that nearly ended in the annihilation of the Pequot people. As a result of the Pequots’ conquest, Robert Seeley, his old minister John Davenport, the puritans from Coleman Street who had followed him across the Atlantic, and thousands of other settlers could lay a clear claim to the river valley, where, as Mason wrote, “God led his people through many difficulties and turnings, yet by more than an ordinary hand of Providence, he brought them to Canaan at last.” Having left behind the persecuting bishops of Old England and now having prosecuted a successful war against the “savages” of New England, the saints could now pursue the reformation of church, state, and society in a godly commonwealth of increase, a land of Canaan that would one day become the colony of Connecticut.1 In this chapter we will explore the links between the reformation work of the English godly and their colonial peers before the English Revolution, maintaining our focus as much as possible on how Coleman Street puritans forged these connections. By 1640 close to 53,700 people had made their way to the colonies from Britain and Ireland; they were joined by well over a thousand persons of African descent who had been stolen from Africa or the slave ships of the Portuguese and Spanish and forced into a life of bondage in English colonies. Although the puritans settled everywhere the English ventured around the Atlantic, they made especially strong showings on Bermuda and Providence Island.2 Importantly, under the direction of slave-trading puritan investors in London, Providence Island transitioned into a racialized slave society more rapidly than any other English colony—a fate that most of the leaders of the fourteen thousand colonists who settled in New England from 1630 to 1640 wished to avoid. Despite their differences, however, the histories of Providence Island and colonial New England would become connected in ways that would do much to inspire the imperial ambition of England’s Revolutionary governments. New England receives the most attention in this chapter. For our pur-

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poses, it remains singularly important as the only colonial region (as opposed to colony) dominated by puritans. Consequently, it became the only region in the English Atlantic outside of England itself where conflicts among the godly produced a dominant, ideologically diverse, and contentious puritan political culture.3 Unsurprisingly, given Coleman Streeters’ prominence in godly circles, they made major contributions to New England puritanism on both sides of the Atlantic. We will trace the ward’s connections to New England most directly by following John Davenport and his Coleman Street cadre across the Atlantic. Like the peers they left behind in Old England, the migrating godly agreed on neither the nature of godliness nor what they meant by reformation, let alone how the latter should be undertaken in church, state, and society. The ensuing struggle to define the New England Way pitted the respective proponents of the Magisterial and Radical Reformations against one another, with the former stressing the authority of clerics and magistrates while the latter, dominated by antinomians, saw a wider role for the laity and freemen, looking askance at any human institution that denied the sufficiency of the Spirit to guide the saints in their reformation work. It should not be too surprising then that the “Antinomian Controversy” that shook New England in the later 1630s came to involve many of the same issues that had led to Samuel How and John Goodwin’s showdown on Coleman Street. And just as with the godly who squared off at the Nag’s Head Tavern in London, the issues that divided New England’s saints ranged well beyond the cloistered intellectualism of pure doctrinal disputation. As a result, when measures to achieve reconciliation within formal religious venues failed, warring factions of saints turned to politics to define the character and future course of the American reformation, a pattern that took shape around the English Atlantic, first in the colonies and later in Revolutionary England itself.4 While the New England godly were not bound by a uniform religious discipline before they crossed the Atlantic, those who sailed with the Winthrop fleet in 1630 did strike a covenant based on a social gospel that condemned the economic and social relations of early modern capitalism, where fellow Christians “ate up the poor,” in Winthrop’s own words, in the pursuit of “filthy lucre.”5 In contrast to the other colonial regions in the English Atlantic, New England’s founders departed from the humanist vision of colonization best articulated by Richard Hakluyt, where the primary purpose of colonization lay in increasing the strength of the English commonwealth in order to advance the Protestant Reformation at the expense of Catholic Spain. New England, in the eyes of its founders, would be a refuge from and

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not an extension of England, a (not “the”) “city on a hill,” a self-consciously autonomous, practical Christian model of moral and social reformation for Protestants in England and the world over to emulate.6 But as much as New Englanders differentiated themselves from other colonists through their practical Christian covenant, they joined their colonial peers by laying the foundation for a racial hierarchy of the Atlantic world’s “savage” and “civilized” peoples. While struggling to embrace greed-denying principles of selfless love within their own communities, most of the New England godly abandoned them vis-à-vis the region’s Indians and African slaves. Such a selective application of first principles led to the racialization of the saints’ “model of Christian charity,” a far from inevitable cultural permutation given the saints’ claims that their colonial commonwealths would love and liberate the “heathens” that the Spanish had brutalized and enslaved in their American dominions. As in every other colonial region in the English Atlantic, racial hierarchies took nascent form in New England when colonists began justifying the subordination of the “savage” to the “civilized” along ostensibly natural and providential lines. Importantly, however, godly radicals in the colonies began deconstructing and resisting these racial hierarchies just as most settlers began acting upon them, illustrating how race and antiracism, slavery and antislavery evolved from the beginning in a dialectical fashion around the English Atlantic. Mo s t godly migrants steered clear of the Chesapeake after the crown took direct control of Virginia in 1624. Puritans did establish toeholds in parts of Virginia, particularly in the counties of Upper Norfolk and the Isle of Wight. Despite the leadership of the formidable Irish saint Daniel Gookin Jr., their small numbers translated into a lack of collective godly influence in the colony’s religious and political affairs. Although the Virginia Company injected its original plans to colonize Virginia with virulent doses of militant Protestant, anti-Spanish Catholic rhetoric, puritans there never came close to forming the powerful bloc that they would in other parts of the English Atlantic. For their part, planters in Virginia worried less about the religious estate of the colony and much more about their landed estates, where they hoped to grow wealthier by profiting from tobacco crops harvested (at this time) by mostly British and Irish bond slaves. Virginia’s planters used their power inside and outside of their colonial legislature not to recruit waves of saintly settlers but to expand the headright system originally devised by the Virginia Company, continually refining this “custom of the country” as an incentive to attract cheap labor to the colony. Farther south along the

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Atlantic coastline, the puritan William Vassal saw a future for the godly in what became known as Carolina, but his plans for a colony there came to naught. For the saints, the path of least resistance ran away from Carolina and crown colonies like Virginia to settlements like Bermuda and later to New England, where the godly stood a better chance of thriving in commonwealths of their own creation. The patronage of the puritan earl of Warwick became indispensable to these godly projects and others such as the projected English West India Company, Warwick’s attempt to compete with a profitable Dutch venture of the same name that threatened to limit the potential for English expansion around the Atlantic. Though it was opposed by the crown in the midst of its other difficulties with powerful militant Protestants during the constitutional crises of the 1620s, godly leaders would continue to push for the formation of an English West Indian Company for the next twenty years, but to no avail.7 Warwick’s more successful efforts in Bermuda did afford godly colonialists from Coleman Street and elsewhere with an opportunity to increase their own fortunes along with that of the commonwealth, all to Spain’s disadvantage. Maurice Abbot, Thomas Wroth, and later Owen Rowe and James Russell established estates on the island, and during the Revolutionary years Rowe and Russell would eventually serve from London as Bermuda’s governors. Bermuda’s investors and colonists supported a flourishing Protestant establishment, financing the construction of nine churches, a chapel, and five parsonages by 1640. A variant of godly religiosity clearly reigned in Bermuda, as a 1639 journal kept by a Spanish prisoner describes familiar forms of reform-minded worship: two three-hour meetings on the Sabbath dominated by lengthy sermons. Bermuda’s most famous minister, John Oxenbridge, had formed a gathered congregation there by 1639, excluding the “profane” from the sacraments. Out of step with the colonial godly of New England, Bermuda’s governing council largely opposed this move, as it sundered Christian unity in a small colony whose survival depended upon the cohesion of its settlers.8 The West Indian voyage of the Bermudan pirate Daniel Elfrith in 1627– 28 led to the creation of another puritan colony, Providence Island, located 110 miles off the Caribbean coast of present-day Nicaragua. A year after Captain Elfrith completed his tour of the Caribbean, Bermuda’s governor Daniel Bell, drawing on the journal that Elfrith kept during his journeys, wrote that Providence would surpass his own colony as a place for the puritans to prosper. “The island . . . cannot fail,” Bell informed the Bermuda Company directorate in London; “none can be more fruitful or more hope-

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ful . . . it lying in the heart of the Indies and the mouth of the Spaniards.” This strategic location made Providence a perfect place for pirates to intercept Spanish galleons groaning with gold and silver; the Dutch freebooter Piet Hien had done as much in 1628, capturing a fleet of Spanish treasure ships not far from the island. Piratical gain would be coupled with profitable plantations on Providence, for as Bell wrote, “the pleasantness and rich fertility of the soil” would make “tobacco or any other commodities . . . double or treble any man’s estate in all England.”9 Incorporating the Providence Island Company in 1630, Warwick recruited puritans to dominate the island’s London-based governing council, although oddly given their high profile in puritan projects in England and around the English Atlantic, only one Coleman Streeter, Sir Thomas Barnardiston, invested to any significant degree. The company’s board of directors, dominated by the commanding figure John Pym, insisted that the island furnish two homes for puritan ministers and implored Bell, who became Providence’s first governor, to give the puritan clergy “all the encouragement you can, for our sincere aim and desire above all things is to plant the true and sincere religion and worship of God, which in the Christian world is now very much opposed.” Establishing Providence as a lone puritan outpost hard by the Spanish Main, the company coined a seemingly fitting motto for the colony, Innocens Liberabit Insulam, or “The Innocent Shall Preserve the Island.”10 In truth, innocence did not preserve the island; rather, a combination of authoritarian government, piracy, and slavery did, for Providence prospered by suppressing godly dissent while modeling its economy on the pirateslave trading plantation system that Elfrith, Warwick, Abbot, and other colonial investors and adventurers had pioneered in Virginia and Bermuda. Although puritans made up a majority of the island’s 350 settlers, the company’s directors and the island’s governors would not allow godly scruples to obstruct Providence’s potential profitability. When the minister Lewis Morgan protested to the company’s directors in 1633 that the planters made only a mere show of godliness, they suspended him from the ministry and imprisoned him aboard a ship that soon deposited him in London, where the company stripped him of his pay. In response to Morgan’s petition, the directors wrote Governor Bell that the company’s quest for profits amounted to a “great service in . . . propagating God’s true religion and spreading the English empire,” as the island’s economic success ensured it as “a refuge for those oppressed for righteousness’ sake.” The puritan minister Henry Root abandoned the island in 1634, complaining about the dearth of piety in the

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puritan citadel. When the Reverend Hope Sherrrard barked too loudly the same year, Bell imprisoned him. In 1636, Providence’s new governor, the puritan Captain Robert Hunt, backed Sherrard’s campaign against Elfrith, whom the minister labeled a “carnal and ungodly man.” Although Hunt removed this pirate from the island’s governing council, Pym reversed the action and dismissed the godly troublemakers backing Sherrard as “a mere nullity.” Later in 1638, when the pirate Captain Andrew Carter had become the island’s effective governor, he shipped two more complaining ministers back to England, this at a point when the island had evolved from a mere safe harbor to a virtual citadel for freebooting mariners on the make.11 Rendering such conflict on the island as a struggle between the sacred and profane would be a gross distortion. First, the puritan-led directorate of the Providence Island Company empowered its own governors to issue letters of marque to the deep-sea rovers, a pathetic nod to the rule of law that the directors otherwise undermined by pillaging Spanish ships and colonies in peacetime. Second, notwithstanding the moaning from the puritan quarter about the debauchery of the island’s pirates, the Lord’s own did little to glorify his presence among them, short-selling the success of a preaching clergy by refusing to pay their ministers. They also allowed Providence’s church to fall into disrepair, a revealing symbol of their decaying devotion to the island’s purported puritan mission. Militant Protestantism and humanist pretensions slipped quickly into single-minded capitalism when planters realized that subsidizing the church would reduce their ability to maximize profits. Third, the same puritan planters who decried Elfrith’s pirates benefited the most from their plundering; they conveniently looked past the pirates’ drinking and gambling when it came time to buy the Africans that the buccaneers had stolen from the Spanish. When the godly got down to business on Providence Island, they started dealing in slaves with those whom they otherwise decried as profane, rendering the moral distinctions they drew between themselves and their piratical partners unconvincing at best.12 Appearing first in clearest form on Providence Island, the racialization of the English colonial social hierarchy was forged the in the crucible of plantation capitalism. By 1640, the colony’s 381 African and Native Americans slaves outnumbered its 350 European residents, creating, as the island’s historian Karen Kupperman has correctly observed, the first slave society in the English Atlantic. A slave society is different from a society with slaves; in the latter, slave labor is exploited without pervasively impacting the rest of the society; in a slave society, the interests of the slaveholding classes,

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particularly the wealthiest among them, decisively shape and dominate the society’s social, economic, and political institutions. As Kupperman wrote, “Slavery shored up the promise of full membership in the society for all English colonists; gaps in the system were supplied by the absolute denial of rights to Africans.” With the proliferation of capitalist social and economic relations around the Atlantic world, early modern colonial slave societies created new and intensely exploitative class relationships, mediated by another innovation, the legal and cultural institution of race. In a very thinking decision, the colonists of Providence Island enslaved African and, to a lesser extent, Indian people, brutally exploiting their labor to maximize profits, justifying such lifelong bondage through biblical warrant and the alleged inherent inferiority of those they drove, beat, bled, and branded. As company treasurer John Pym advised in the colony’s earliest days, the more powerful Providence became through the use of “negros,” the more potent Protestant England’s challenge would be to Catholic Spain and its reign of terror and tyranny in the Americas.13 While the planters of Providence understood the enslavement of Africans as part of their wider world of reformation work, it’s clear that slavery corroded the religious integrity of puritan masters. While refusing to tap into their profits to renovate the island’s rapidly decaying churches, godly owners beat their “negro” slaves in such “harsh and rigorous” fashion that it astonished such seasoned colonial veterans as Governor Nathaniel Butler. Speaking specifically about puritan slave masters in a letter to the company directors in London, Butler wrote that their cruelty reached such heights of brutality that “you would not believe me.” The puritan minister Hope Sherrard, who owned black slaves as well as indentured white servants, seems to have been no exception, as his workers black and white took advantage of his sermons to escape together to Tortuga, where, along with others escaping bondage from elsewhere in the Atlantic, they established their own commonwealth—though a multiracial one built from the bottom up—which quickly became a buzzing nest of buccaneers.14 T h e projectors of the Massachusetts Bay Company steered clear of the piratical-plantation mode of colonization that their peers had pursued elsewhere in the Atlantic. In contrast to the remote rule employed by the directors of the Virginia and Providence Island Companies, they refused to run the Bay Colony’s affairs from London. In Massachusetts, the colonists themselves, not the company directorate, would constitute the sovereign body politic. From the outset, the Bay Company leadership, drawn largely

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from the ranks of the feoffees of impropriation, strove boldly and purposefully to rescue English expansion from militant Protestant declension.15 The labors of Coleman Street’s puritan community became integral to this effort across the Atlantic; indeed, contributions by the ward’s godly elite helped to define the first generation of puritan colonization in New England. John Davenport and his St. Stephen’s parishioners Sir Richard Saltonstall, Owen Rowe, William Spurstowe, Samuel Aldersely, Edward Hopkins, Isaac Pennington, George Foxcroft, and Theophilus Eaton all became leading investors in the company. Eaton himself served as the company’s first president. In all, ten of the Bay Colony’s original thirty-three subscribers hailed from Coleman Street Ward. Other luminaries not from the ward included the divines Hugh Peter, John Cotton, and Thomas Hooker. In August 1629, while Peter evaded Laudian persecution by fleeing to Holland, Cotton and Hooker traveled to the earl of Lincoln’s East Anglian estate at Sempringham. There they would deliberate with Coleman Street’s Saltonstall and the company’s other leaders about their plans for a godly colony in New England. Along the way to Sempringham, Cotton and Hooker were joined by a young, outspoken, and still obscure Cambridge-educated tutor named Roger Williams, who in a taste of things to come admonished his companions over their use of the “popish” Book of Common Prayer. When the three arrived at the earl’s estate, they would meet John Winthrop, who would become one of the most towering figures in early American history. Focusing on Winthrop’s vision of a New Jerusalem in New England will help us clarify the reasons that he and around seven hundred others undertook their “errand into the Wilderness” in April 1630.16 Raised in Groton as a member of the Suffolk gentry, John Winthrop supplemented his landed income as a common lawyer in the Court of Wards and Liveries. Despite this privilege and success, by 1629, the lord of Groton Manor had had enough of England. His feelings here owed in some part to his family’s cosmopolitan outlook and experiences, a feature of his English background that had long made seizing opportunities outside his native land an appealing option. His uncle John had fought in Ireland with the earl of Essex to suppress the Tyrone Rebellion, a bloody term of service that earned the soldier an estate in Cork. Nephew followed uncle to Ireland, but young Winthrop’s stay there, unlike his uncle’s, was short-lived. Returning to England, he settled back in Suffolk, where he raised a family that eventually scattered about the Atlantic in its own diaspora. John Winthrop’s son Henry arrived in Barbados with the first generation of English settlers there, while another son, Samuel, became deputy governor of Antigua. The

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father’s namesake John Jr. had attended Trinity College Dublin and later traveled to the Levant. Leaving an England seemingly deserted by God did not trouble the younger John, who wrote to his father that “I have seen so much of the vanity of the world, that I esteem no more of the diversities of countries than as so many inns, whereof the traveler that hath lodged in the best or in the worst findeth no difference, when he cometh to his journey’s end . . . I shall call that my country where I most glorify God.” His father shared these globe-trotting sentiments and dwelt at length upon them in a 1629 manuscript titled “Reasons to be Considered for Justifying the Undertakers of the Intended Plantation in New England . . .”17 Winthrop drew upon his cosmopolitan heritage, his humanist education, and the godly’s sorry plight under the Stuarts to justify the saints’ transatlantic exodus; experientially, however, the moral philosophy that drove his colonial program derived most from the Christian witness he bore to the suffering of the poor under early modern capitalism. Although he probably read the copy of Thomas Smith’s De Republica Anglorum that his father, Adam, had purchased for the family library, Winthrop rejected Smith’s notion that the destitute should serve gentlemen such as himself in slavelike conditions, to work under “severe masters” for the “common profit” of the propertied orders of a “civil society” that prospered from the fruit of others’ labor. Winthrop wrote that England had grown “weary of her inhabitants, so that man . . . the most precious of all creatures, is here more vile and base than the earth they tread upon. So as children, neighbors, and friends, especially of the poor, are counted the greatest burdens, where if things were right, would be counted the chiefest earthly blessings.” “Where if things were right” is a telling phrase integral to Winthrop’s epistemology, one less consonant with the humanism of Thomas Smith and much more resonant with that of Thomas More, who looking upon the poverty created by enclosure famously called England a nation where “sheep devoured men.” In matters of commerce, as Winthrop wrote, a “good, upright man” in trade who failed to improve his “mean estate” by following the “deceitful and unrighteous” practices of his merchant peers would be held by them in “scorn and contempt.” As a member of the gentry facing his own financial debts, he testified to how landlords had become “intolerably burdened” by the unbound rapacity of brokers, jobbers, and “the clerk of the market.” For Winthrop, a relentless quest for wealth at the expense of the welfare of other Christians led to “intemperance in all excess of riot,” both in the way that the rich ground down the poor and through the seditious resistance that the poor organized, sometimes violently, against their own exploitation. Win-

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throp knew whereof he spoke, for crowds led by women rose up in nearby Maldon in a grain riot the very year he wrote these words, which gave them an immediate sense of urgency. That women helped organize these disturbances, and that one of their leaders, Ann Carter, was hanged for her display of de facto citizenship, must have greatly aggravated Winthrop’s patriarchal sensibilities. What we call capitalism today had, in Winthrop’s eyes, led to a cycle of exploitation, suffering, gender inversion, and social class strife antithetical to a Christian commonwealth, a cycle that could, as Winthrop feared, plunge England into the same kind of monstrous bloodbath that had soaked Germany in the Peasants’ War.18 Winthrop lamented the straitened circumstances of honest propertied families as well as the suffering of poor commoners without property. He understood both situations as the antichristian measure of a sinful world consumed by a new kind of greed. Unfortunately, this lust for filthy lucre had already made its way across the Atlantic. In his Reasons, Winthrop rejected the godly counterarguments against migration, which predicted that the Bay Colonists would endure the same horrors that Virginia’s first settlers had faced. Winthrop wrote that Virginia’s initial brush with catastrophe resulted from the “sloth” of Chesapeake planters and the degeneracy of its plantation workforce, “a multitude of rude and misgoverned persons, the very scum of the land,” who morally speaking served as “unfit instruments” for the reformation work the saints intended to undertake in Massachusetts. “The fruit of any public design,” Winthrop wrote, “is not to be discerned by the immediate success”; such lapses in judgment as those witnessed in Virginia inevitably occurred when the “main end” of colonization became “carnal and not religious.” As a means of preserving New England from Virginia’s descent into carnal self-seeking, Winthrop and the General Court would prohibit the system of “bond-slavery” in the Bay Colony, the term they used for the temporary chattel condition that Virginia’s idle elite planters imposed on their overworked indentured servants. For as Winthrop wrote, what “we stand in need of is treasured up in the earth by the Creator to be fetched thence by the sweat of our brows”; honest labor would prevent the godly from lusting after “the fleshpots of Egypt,” or the dross puritans associated with the Bible’s prototypical slave society.19 Winthrop knew how tempting these “fleshpots” could be, as they had seduced his own son, Henry, a Barbadian tobacco planter. In a January 1628 letter, father admonished son for the latter’s reckless pursuit of profit, an experience that drove both men into debt. For subsidizing Henry’s stay on Barbados while paying the additional debts that he had accumu-

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lated there, Winthrop complained that Henry had managed to grow only “very ill-conditioned, foul” tobacco, “full of stalks and “evil coloured,” that “none . . . would give five shillings a pound for.” Undaunted, Henry just demanded more, asking his father to invest an additional £200 in a new Barbadian venture of his own invention. This only inflamed the elder Winthrop’s righteous indignation. He wrote to Henry, “I have many other children that are unprovided for and . . . I marvel at your great undertakings, having no means. . . . Solomon saith: He who hasteth to be rich shall surely come to poverty. This hath been always the fruit of your vain, over-reaching mind, which will be your overthrow.” Henry, seizing the main chance in Barbados, had come to embody all that his father loathed about the world of business.20 In 1630, Winthrop applied the lessons he had learned from Virginia and Barbados in his celebrated prevoyage sermon “A Model of Christian Charity.” When set against extant experience in the colonial Chesapeake and West Indies, this famous piece of early American literature vividly illustrates the exceptional ethos of Christian social justice that guided plans for the settlement of New England. In his “Model” Winthrop did not portray New England as a mere refuge for the persecuted. Instead, he tried to uplift anxious passengers with a passionate vision of a Christian commonwealth based on the power of love, where personal regeneration would translate into religious and social reformation. World-weary colonists would be transfigured into “new creatures,” born again in the image of God; Winthrop believed or at least hoped that their collective efforts, regenerated by a return to gospel principles, would effect a practical Christian social transformation. “We are a company professing ourselves fellow members of Christ . . . to account ourselves knit together by this bond of love . . . for the work we have in hand. . . . Thus stands the cause between God and us.” Having “entered into covenant with Him for this work,” colonists had united themselves by their “mutual consent . . . under a due form of government both civil and ecclesiastical” founded on the “moral law,” which Jesus summed up with his command “Do whatsoever ye would that men should do to you.” The practical application of the golden rule of selfless love, what the godly christened “the royal law” of “King Jesus,” would promote an intensely felt and authentically satisfying spiritual life that would culminate in the realization of social justice, what puritans themselves called “equity.” Since “love was the fulfilling of the law,” Winthrop believed that the godly commonwealth should work to “loose the bonds of wickedness . . . take off the heavy burdens . . . let the oppressed go free and . . . break every

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yoke . . . to deal thy bread to the hungry and to bring the poor that wander into thy house, when thou seest the naked to cover them.” The Spirit of God, or love, worked as a “moderating and restraining” bond between the providentially ordained orders of the “rich” and “poor,” so that “the rich and mighty should not eat up the poor, nor the poor and despised rise up against and shake off their yoke.” “The fruit” of this “new birth” would hasten the downfall of Antichrist and the oppression, envy, and strife that his tyranny had substituted for the harmony that God intended as the guide for class relationships. The saving grace of Christ would regenerate the people, “perfect[ing]” the archetypal “old man Adam,” enabling him as a “new creature” to enter “into one body again” as a member of the covenanted community. Winthrop’s model for reformation, instrumentalized through the covenant, located the mystical union between spiritual regeneration and earthly justice at the heart of the godly commonwealth. In this way, as Winthrop wrote, by striving for the common good through Christian love, “a man is become again a living soul.”21 Keeping the covenant as an instrument of reformation implied apocalyptic consequences. Winthrop warned that falling back into the ways of men to “prosecute our carnal intentions . . . for ourselves and our posterity” would bring forth the wrath of God, who would be “revenged of such a people.” But if the saints kept the royal law in fidelity to the “articles” of their covenant, Winthrop envisioned a future of glory for the spirit, not the flesh, where “succeeding generations would proclaim, Lord make us like that of New England.”22 D rop p i n g anchor off the American coast in July 1630, the Bay Colonists busily set about constructing a new life for themselves in the face of early setbacks involving disease and the scarcity of provisions. The settlers’ industry in the face of such adversity still impresses. Having begun in 1629 with an advance wave under John Endicott that had already established the village-port of Salem, by the autumn of 1630 the colonists had set up seven new towns in the vicinity of Massachusetts Bay: Watertown, Roxbury, Dorchester, Medford, Saugus, Charlestown, and Shawmut. It would not be long before the settlers renamed the last of these Boston after the East Anglian town from which many of them came, including John Cotton, teacher of the First Church, who arrived in 1633. Over the next twenty years a meetinghouse, along with a governor’s mansion made of brick, sturdy wharves, warehouses, inns, ordinaries, forges, fortresses, grist mills, a school building, and hundreds of clapboard houses, would spring up on

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the narrow neck of land that jutted into the commodious, island-studded harbor. But for most of the 1630s Boston, which quickly became the capital of the colony, looked raw, mean, and muddy, a village more than a town, made of small, thatch-roofed homes with wooden chimneys that constantly threatened to set the entire place ablaze. The majority of Massachusetts’s first settlers hailed from the “middling sort” of English society: shopkeepers, artisans, master tradesmen, and of course yeoman farmers. Servants, who usually immigrated with families, made up about a quarter of the population. Merchants also constituted a sizable portion of both Bay Company investors and Bay Colony settlers; they knitted themselves together across the Atlantic through commerce in timber, fish, livestock, cloth, hardware, and foodstuffs. Coleman Street puritans figured prominently in these mercantile networks, with Owen Rowe, William Spurstowe, Edward Hopkins, Theophilus Eaton, and Samuel Aldersly playing the largest parts. Sir Richard Saltonstall and his son Richard arrived with the Winthrop fleet, founded Dorchester and Watertown, and won elections as deacons and magistrates in the First Church and General Court respectively. In the meantime, London merchant Theophilus Eaton moved into the Saltonstall family townhome on Swann Alley; seven years later, Eaton would follow the Saltonstalls to Massachusetts. By 1640, two thousand people would be living in Boston; artisans concentrated there to supply the colonies’ domestic, commercial, and agricultural economies. On the other hand, most Bay Colonists lived on the land, trying to transplant the ideal of the self-sufficient and virtuous yeoman farmer from England to America.23 The combined recruiting efforts of London merchant Matthew Craddock and Coleman Street Ward’s John Davenport furnished the Bay Colony with one of its first three ministers, Francis Bright, who had lived on Swann Alley near the Saltonstalls. According to the instructions Bright received from the company’s directors, he would be “preaching, catechizing,” and “teaching . . . the company’s children as also the savages and their children.” Apparently the task proved too much for the young parson, who returned to Old England before the end of 1630. While Bright did assist in the formation of the Newtown church before departing, his clerical counterparts Francis Higgeson and Samuel Skelton, plus the Coleman Streeter Robert Seely, Craddock’s New England business agent, joined the community at Salem. With the notable exceptions of the Saltonstalls and the wine cooper Thomas Venner, most of the saints affiliated with Coleman Street’s godly community who entered Massachusetts eventually lit out for new colonies, reflecting the remarkable intercolonial mobility of the seventeenth century

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that the historian Alison Games has chronicled so well. Davenport’s group, as noted at the beginning of this chapter, ended up in Connecticut by the end of the decade. Samuel How’s fellow conventicler John Lathrop got out of jail in 1634 and headed straight to the Bay Colony on board the Griffin with thirty other former London conventiclers as well as Anne Hutchinson and her large family. Lathrop’s crew first tried Salem, attracted by the Reverend Skelton’s separatist sympathies, but soon left to establish the town of Scituate in Plymouth Colony before moving on to another settlement at Barnstable. Thomas Venner, who had embraced How’s gospel of the Spirit’s sufficiency in London, settled in Salem in 1637 before moving to Boston in 1644.24 How’s disciples in America, however, would find their Radical Reformation convictions under attack once again by their puritan brethren. In the Bay Colony, citizenship stemmed from church membership, with congregations gathered and instituted by the saints themselves rather than the civil government. With the authority to implement a single form of church government while in possession of the civil government, the supporters of Magisterial Reformation in the Bay Colony, who dominated the court and clergy, had the opportunity to shape the puritan movement to an extent that their peers in England and around the Atlantic could only dream of; godly dissenters would either be reconciled with the truth or be forced to make their own way in the wilderness. An admirer of Samuel How’s and a neighbor of Venner’s in Salem would not make the course of the Magisterial Reformation in America an easy one; his name was Roger Williams, and he would later become one the most famous figures in seventeenth-century American history. Williams believed that migration and colonization offered the saints an unrivaled opportunity to advance the Protestant Reformation, as the remove across the Atlantic would allow them to restore the covenant of grace as the sovereign foundation of the godly community. Having gathered themselves into purified congregations, Williams maintained, the regenerated saints could retain their spiritual sovereignty only through complete separation from the Church of England. But while they had crossed an ocean to physically separate themselves from the bishops, Williams’s many critics in New England still saw themselves in theoretical communion with the Anglican Church and thus regarded Williams and those who agreed with them as schismatics. Williams, for his part, felt that the colony’s other churches had no authority over Salem’s, where separatist belief ran high. Although the Bay Colony clergy shared Williams’s convictions concerning congregational autonomy, they supported the court’s position that it retained the prerogative power

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to enforce church discipline if the practice of any believer or congregation threatened the civil peace and spiritual well-being of the covenanted commonwealth. With godly men running the colony’s court, as opposed to the corrupt bishops and councilors of Old England, the magistrates hardly felt, as Williams did, that they had invested themselves with the same kind of tyrannical authority as Star Chamber and High Commission. In Salem, Williams worried that the court’s discretionary latitude allowed it to become a law unto itself, and thus a threat to the people’s spiritual and civil sovereignty.25 At the same time, however, Williams launched an even more fundamental challenge to the court, denying that the “king’s grant,” or the colony’s charter, established a sovereign jurisdiction for the saints in New England; Williams argued that the settlers “could have no title” to any American land without having first “compounded with the natives.” Williams’s thinking here may have stemmed in part from his days as the protégé of the famed jurist Sir Edward Coke, a key player in the Petition of Right controversies and the author of twelve volumes of reports on English court cases as well as the classic legal text Institutes of the Laws of England. Coke’s writings set the standard by which all interpretations of the English ancient constitution would be measured. Williams’s challenge to the Bay Colony patent echoed Coke’s claim that all sovereign governments sometime in their history acquired the active consent of their people to rule over them. Thus new governments such as the Bay Colony could not legitimately employ a royal patent to claim sovereignty over Indians who had not voluntarily subjected themselves to the king’s authority.26 In a journal entry from December 1633, John Winthrop recorded that Roger Williams had written a “treatise” (now lost) to the courts of Plymouth and Massachusetts that negated their jurisdictional sovereignty, based on the idea that the colonists had not acquired the consent of the original inhabitants to live on their land. The following October, Winthrop noted that Williams had preached on the same theme in Salem, declaring that the colonists had committed a “national sin” by settling on Indian land without Indian consent; renouncing this sin by compacting with the Indians, Williams contended, amounted to a “national duty.” Even though Williams had helped to found the Bay Colony, he did not privilege the colonial aspirations of Christians over the sovereignty of America’s Indians; no matter how conducive it might be to the welfare and harmony of an exclusive commonwealth of Christians, expropriating the natives’ land to secure economic opportunity for settlers amounted to theft and therefore sin.27 Here

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Williams tapped into a strain of humanist thought that emphasized “cession,” or the acquisition of native consent in the process of colonial expansion. In relying on such principles and construing their violation as “sin,” Williams likely drew from the moral philosophy of Christian humanism, ably summed up by the historian Ernst Cassirer: “The old humanistic ideal of religion . . . that of Colet, Erasmus, and Thomas More . . . undisturbed by all suspicions of the sanctification of heathendom . . . maintain[s] that he who bears within him the true spirit of Christ, though he has never heard His name, deserves far more to be called a Christian than those who know and profess all the articles faith in Christendom, and yet do not exemplify them in their lives.” What Cassirer concluded in regard to the writings of Colet, Erasmus, and More, that “the forces of humanism work for the sake of religion,” also applied to Williams. The same could be said for Winthrop vis-à-vis the community of saints; but in the case of “heathens,” a term they both used to denote Indians, Williams turned Winthrop’s concept of practical Christian equity inside out, extending the sovereignty of the golden rule to Indians as well as to Christians. In the eyes of the General Court, Williams’s radical challenge certainly made him a very dangerous man.28 The leaders of the Bay Colony, however, could draw on other strains in the English humanist tradition to defend the fundamental sovereignty of their American commonwealth. In his 1629 Reasons for colonizing New England, Winthrop asked why the saints should “strive here for places of habitation” in England when America, “a whole continent . . . fruitful and convenient for the use of man . . . lie[s] waste without any improvement,” particularly when “that which lies common, and has never been replenished or subdued, is free to any that possess and improve it.” Applying theory to practice, Winthrop went on to write that “the natives in New England . . . enclose no land, neither have they any settled habitation, nor any tame cattle to improve the land by . . . so if we leave them sufficient for their own use, we may lawfully take the rest.” Winthrop used, and perhaps invented, the term vacuum domicilum, which, drawing on English humanist thought concerning the Elizabethan wars of conquest and colonization in Ireland, accounted unimproved lands held by “barbarians” as vacant and therefore justifiably open for settlement by the “civilized.” Edward Coke, exposing his own notions of what constituted civility and savagery in the Atlantic, used the concept in a 1603 tract to justify the dispossession of Chesapeake Indians. Coke’s Virginia Company partner John Donne made the expropriation of Indian land a common cause of humanity, arguing that the interest reipublicae, or the interests of the commonwealth, served the interest

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mundo, or interest of “the whole world,” by taking “care that all places” colonized “be improved, as far as may be, to the best advantage of mankind in general.”29 All of this, of course, belied the reality of Native American societies, which had settled, sophisticated, largely agricultural economies that produced surpluses of food and goods for trade; any saint considering the remove to New England could have gathered this fact from the published writings and illustrations of those who had been to the “new world.” Plymouth colonists, for instance, had written of the agricultural surplus of their Indian neighbors. Like the Virginians a decade before, local Indian food stores, not to mention the politically calculated goodwill of local Indians, had actually saved the settlers at Plymouth from starving to death, a not obscure piece of intelligence in the early modern Atlantic. But in the end, in the eyes of most English colonial projectors, what mattered most was “increase,” not agriculture. The Indians failed, just like the Irish, to “improve” the land for profit. Indeed, the phrase “beyond the pale” derived in part from English colonial experience in Ireland, to demarcate where civilized rule ended and the internal frontier of savagery began. Justifying expansion into New England through humanist theory (vacuum domicilium) and past practice (the Munster and Ulster plantations), Winthrop regarded Williams’s nullification of the king’s patent as seditious, and in all likelihood as unlearned and at cross-purposes with one of the main purposes of colonization, generating profit through the economic improvement of “savage” lands.30 But Winthrop knew that the godly had more than humanist thought and Irish experience on their side; providence, too, seemed to take their part. In New England, the natives died in droves from disease. The smallpox epidemics of 1616–17 wiped out close to 90 percent of the Algonquin peoples then living near the New England coastline. Bearing witness to the devastation, the colonist Thomas Morton likened New England to a “new found Golgotha.” Winthrop saw things differently. In 1629, he wrote that through the plague, “God hath hearby cleared our title to this place,” meaning that God had set his stamp of providential approval on the saints’ colonial design with the blood of native Americans, the heathen who had died to make way for the godly. Ironically, such grim perceptions of divine intervention, not at all uncommon in the early modern period, brightened the practical Christian prospects for social reform that Winthrop and his cohort envisioned. With more Indian land freed up through the smallpox scourge, godly freemen, no matter how lacking in means, stood a better chance of coming into possession of their own property. Unlike most of the abused bond slaves of

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the Chesapeake, who died early on in their stay, New England’s servants, if saints, could become landowning freemen themselves, provided they applied themselves with industry, thrift, and sobriety once their term of service expired.31 In October 1635 the magistrates banished Roger Williams from the Bay Colony upon pain of death for questioning the royal patent and the court’s religious prerogatives. That December, the godly jurists hatched a plan to ship Williams back to England, where he would have found himself at the mercy of the Laudian prerogative courts. Heresy hunting within the ranks of the godly, never an apolitical project, had crossed the Atlantic with the Bay Colonists. But in a true display of Christian charity, John Winthrop warned Williams of his impending arrest. While trying to protect the public good from what he considered Williams’s seditious challenge, Winthrop never lost his respect and affection for the young radical, and so in America he tried his best to preserve the “bond of love” that had originally united them in England. With Winthrop’s help, Williams left for Narragansett country, walking ninety miles in a winter storm that nearly killed him. According to his own account, he survived only through the many kindnesses shown him by the Wampanoag Indians and their sachem, Massasoit. Safely out of the Bay Colony patent, Williams purchased land from Narragansett Indians and began his settlement, which he named, not without a little irony, Providence.32 Williams’s reproach to the Bay Colony court and clergy frustrated the progress of the Magisterial Reformation in New England. It also confronted an emerging colonial ideology of indigenous dispossession and subordination that moved away from the more benevolent dimensions of humanist thought regarding colonization. Hakluyt’s dream was slowly dissolving into a Spenserian nightmare in America. Born in part from English experience in Ireland, the dominant colonial ideology regarding “barbarians,” first in Virginia and then in New England, ultimately privileged colonial ambition over the natural rights and civil sovereignty of natives and native governments—a significant if not tragic occasion in the intellectual history of the English Atlantic that would eventually cost hundreds of thousands of Indian lives. Fol l ow i n g almost upon the heels of Williams’s banishment, the intertwined events known as the Pequot War and the Antinomian Controversy involved two bracing high-stakes confrontations (ca. 1636–38). The first was a clash between proponents of the Radical and Magisterial Reformations in

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New England, while the other pitted the Pequot Indians against colonists and their Indian allies, the Narragansetts. Unfortunately, most of the scholarship on the Antinomian Controversy33 makes little if any mention of the Pequot War.34 But as I will show here, the Pequot War and the Antinomian Controversy were part of a larger, reciprocal, even Atlantic history, one that linked increasingly hostile settler-Indian relations to the MagisterialRadical Reformation conflict that the colonists had brought with them to America.35 Winthrop described Anne Hutchinson as “a woman of a haughty and fierce carriage, of a nimble wit and active spirit, and a very voluble tongue, more bold than a man.” Hutchinson (née Marbury) had grown up, much like Winthrop, in a well-to-do East Anglian puritan family. Born in the village of Alford, she and her siblings later moved to London, where their father, Francis, a minister often in trouble as an accused “puritan,” held multiple livings. Hutchinson’s own fiery trials of the spirit took her on a physical and spiritual journey set against the early modern English backdrop of social unrest and religious factionalism. After a conversion experience of an unknown date, she became a devoted disciple of John Cotton, who in 1620 took over pastoral duties at St. Botolph’s Church in nearby Boston. Cotton’s militant Calvinism inspired Hutchinson’s puritan piety and instilled within her a deep mistrust of ministers who departed from his strident warnings about linking works to salvation; Christ alone, not human beings, could save, a promise that Jesus made to those who accepted his free grace. But despite her later protestations, Hutchinson’s religiosity went beyond Cotton’s teachings, resembling more closely the Eatonite emphasis on the perfection of the elect’s spiritual estate. Hutchinson also closed with the Eatonites on the matter of assurance of salvation, gained through the “experiential knowledge,” or mystical wisdom, that the Holy Spirit imparted to the believer over time. Indeed, while living in Lincolnshire, Hutchinson had plunged into a hell of hopelessness over her own sinfulness before she achieved assurance of her salvation through a spiritual epiphany.36 After Hutchinson arrived in Boston in 1634, she quickly impressed a wide circle of women in the colony through her travails as a midwife. Her status as the matriarch of a large gentry family (she gave birth to a total of fifteen children), combined with her skills as a medical practitioner and her evangelical charisma, cultivated bonds of respect and trust with the women she served. Hutchinson was a healer of traumatized bodies and troubled souls; her instruments were medicine, prayer, and prophecy. Another midwife, Mary Dyer, forced out of London during the antinomian purges, emerged

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as Hutchinson’s closest friend and most intractable supporter. Many Bay Colony women knew Hutchinson as a mentor, friend, confidant, physician, and preacher, and as the network of her female supporters expanded, the men of Boston could not help but notice her growing influence, which exceeded in exceptional terms the limitations of power that patriarchy placed on women of all classes and races around the English Atlantic.37 As word of Hutchinson’s gospel of free grace spread across the town, alternate crowds of men and women sometimes exceeding sixty in number began attending biweekly meetings in her home. During these sessions, Hutchinson recited the sermons of local ministers from memory and then followed these with her own. Like the Eatonites on Coleman Street, Hutchinson did not seek accommodation with the puritan clergy; she portrayed most of them in New England as a group of harping legalists whose emphasis on preparation obstructed true reformation by keeping saints trapped in a state of anxiety about their salvation. Neither persistent, prayerful introspection nor constant fidelity to the moral law could sanctify a saint; only the free grace of God could, which revealed itself in the heart and soul of the saint. To restore the teachings of the primitive, uncorrupted church, as Hutchinson preached, the clergy needed to come out of their covenant of works to fully embrace the covenant of grace. What Anne Hutchinson did not preach in Boston was a gospel of religious toleration; instead, firing away before a congregation gathered in her home, which directly faced Winthrop’s, she engaged in a public duel with the colony’s ministers for the privilege of defining the New England Way in godly doctrine. To this the puritan clergy reacted much as their peers in Old England did. Newtown’s Thomas Shepard, who in his earlier life in England had nearly succumbed to the lure of antinomianism, led the clerical counterattack. Shepard dragged more than just spiritual baggage into the fray; he lugged a heavy load of misogyny too, condemning the “community of women” surrounding Hutchinson for subverting traditionally gendered hierarchies of power within the family. Joining Shepard in circling the patriarchal wagons, Winthrop used Hutchinson’s husband William as a case in point, depicting him as an emasculated instrument of her seemingly indomitable will. Although Hutchinson herself stuck strictly to doctrinal disputation, her Radical Reformation tenets— expressed stridently as a woman leading men and women—threatened the Magisterial Reformation through an even more fundamental and dynamic challenge to the gendered order of early modern power. Her heresies and the danger they posed to the covenanted commonwealth increasingly galvanized clerical opposition to her meetings,

im age 2 . Although men and women usually met in separate gatherings in Anne Hutchinson’s antinomian conventicle in Boston, as opposed to the mixed-gender composition of the crowd depicted here, Howard Pyle’s Anne Hutchinson Preaching in Her House in Boston (1901) imparts a powerful sense of Hutchinson’s charisma as a lay preacher. Photo appears courtesy of the Neville Public Museum of Brown County (ANTQL.2008.23).

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although unlike their English colleagues, the Bay Colony clergy had little to fear in the way of a class-based challenge, as Hutchinson left explicit social criticism of this sort alone.38 Since the “middling sort” made up the mainstay of early New England society, the Radical Reformation challenge posed by the region’s antinomians differed in important respects from the one offered on Coleman Street. In terms of gender, antinomian power in the Bay Colony flowed from the bottom up through the “community of women” that Anne Hutchinson had established. But in respect to class, the political power that Hutchinson’s devotees accumulated flowed from the top down, since Winthrop’s successor as governor in 1636, the twenty-two-year-old Henry Vane Jr. quickly joined Hutchinson’s conventicle and became its most ardent public defender. Vane’s father Henry Sr. served King Charles I on the Privy Council, which meant that the youth’s aristocratic status and royal connections rather than any of his own precocious accomplishments had cleared his path to the governor’s chair. The wealthy young merchant William Coddington, an assistant on the General Court and the Bay Colony’s treasurer, also attended Hutchinson’s meetings. The clothier, Oxford MA, and First Church deacon William Aspinwall came as well. Merchants in particular, as the historian Bernard Bailyn first observed, made up a disproportionate demographic within the antinomian faction. Hutchinson’s supporters also included the physician John Clarke, who attended Oxford’s Brasenose College with Aspinwall. Two former Lincolnshire ministers chased out of England by Archbishop Laud, Hutchinson’s brother-in-law John Wheelwright, whom the prophet heard preach in Bilsby, Lincolnshire, and Wheelwright’s friend Hanserd Knollys, both pupils of John Cotton, lined up with the freegrace fundamentalists. Boston’s laypeople, however, rather than its clergymen, dominated the membership. As if to prove the point, any member of the faction forming around Hutchinson could lay claim to the spiritual gift of prophecy, or lay preaching. Their magisterial adversaries, however, liked to keep lay prophecy among themselves and frowned when godly opponents, especially women, chose to exercise the word, thus destabilizing the gendered pillar of puritan social discipline and upsetting the peace of private families and the public at large. For most of the colony’s ministers and magistrates, women preachers breached the covenant’s gendered code of deference, a seditious offense in a godly commonwealth.39 When viewed from the magisterial perspective, such sedition cut at the heart of Christian charity or love. Conditioned by gentry paternalism, dogmatic patriarchal values, and a fierce aversion to free-grace fundamental-

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ism, Winthrop saw the antinomians as impudent, uncompromising, and inequitable meddlers; they had broken the perfect bond of love in the commonwealth and were leading it into the netherworld of schism and heresy. In his premigration sermon Winthrop had warned the colonists against the delusion that colonization would involve any leveling of the constituted order in church, state, and society. He chose this very theme for the first, commanding sentence of “A Model of Christian Charity”: “God almighty in His most holy and wise providence . . . hath so disposed . . . the condition of mankind” that “those in subjection” would be “commanded to obedience” by the “eminent in power and dignity.” The rich would rule over the poor, magistrates over freemen, ministers over laity, husbands over wives, fathers over families. The reformation work of this generation of saints did entail change within the social hierarchy, not in the leveling of its various orders but rather in repairing the strained relationships between them through the resurrection of paternalistic, practical Christianity in all spheres of daily life.40 To Winthrop’s consternation, by the end of 1636 Boston’s free-grace militants began spreading their criticism of the clergy outside the conventicle and into public places, even going so far as to disrupt services in the First Church, from where the debate could be carried into a neighboring tavern at the conclusion of the service. Shouting down Pastor John Wilson and Thomas Shepard during their sermons, the spiritists challenged the clerics to debate their doctrines in the open, just as Samuel How would shortly do in London with John Goodwin. “After . . . our public lectures,” wrote Winthrop in 1636, “you might have seen half a dozen pistols discharged at the face of the preacher, (I mean) so many objections made by the opinionists in the open assembly.” The antinomians proved crack marksmen in public disputation and fielded such a sizable company of saints that Winthrop admitted that their free-grace fusillades were not fired by a fringe element but by the majority of congregants in Boston’s First Church.41 With conflict gripping the community, the General Court declared a communal fast for January 13, 1637, so that the saints could search their hearts for the sources of their communal discord. Preaching that day in the First Church, Hutchinson’s brother-in-law John Wheelwright condemned legalists “as the greatest enemies of Christ” for embracing a “covenant of works.” He warned the saints to “prepare for spiritual combat . . . between the upright and the degenerate” in the coming Armageddon. Wheelwright acknowledged that his words would “cause a combustion in the church and commonwealth.” Nonetheless, he encouraged the saints: “Never fear com-

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bustions and burnings. . . . Christ will purge his floor, layeth the axe to the root, and cutteth down all hypocrites . . . he will purge the church.” Echoing around the bare wooden walls of the unheated meetinghouse, Wheelwright’s words cast antinomians as godly soldiers storming the breastworks of Antichrist; in contrast, the court and clergy saw their opponents as an army of seditionists who, commanded by a sharp-tongued woman, had laid siege to the City on a Hill.42 A t the same time, though, another siege, this one literal, raged in the southern Connecticut River Valley, with Pequot Indians besieging an English furtrading post at Fort Saybrook. This entrepôt, situated at the mouth of the Connecticut River, had been established through a partnership between John Winthrop, his son John, and a group of puritan merchants from the Saybrook Company led by Coleman Street Ward’s Sir Richard Saltonstall, who after a short stay in the Bay Colony had left again for London in 1631. The events leading up to the siege began in January 1634, when Western Niantic Indians killed Captain John Stone, a mariner from Virginia. The Indians targeted Stone because he had kidnapped two of their number while engaging in a trading journey up the Connecticut River Valley. At the time of the murder, the Western Niantics were tributaries of the Pequots, who dominated the valley for dozens of miles along the lower Connecticut River as it flowed into the sea from the New England interior. The Pequots held the upper hand, however tenuously, in the valley’s fur trade, which they conducted with Dutch and English colonists from New Netherlands, Plymouth, and Massachusetts, all of whom wished to displace them. Although the Bay Colony had previously banished Captain Stone as a rogue for his rakish escapades in Boston, the court seized upon his murder to pressure the Pequots to make a set of steep concessions, including delivering up Stone’s killers for their execution in Boston, entering into a trade deal on terms favorable to Massachusetts, and the cession of lands in the Connecticut River Valley.43 Unsurprisingly, the Pequots, who had murdered nobody, rejected these contrived if not severe terms. The stiff competition for Connecticut reached transatlantic proportions in 1635. At this point, in search of economic opportunity and dissatisfied with the authoritarian rule of the Massachusetts magistracy, Bay Colony settlers led by Thomas Hooker and Coleman Street’s Robert Seeley began making inroads along the Connecticut River, establishing settlements at what would become Windsor, Wethersfield, and Hartford. Although these settlers wanted to establish their independence from the Bay, Massachusetts

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wanted to use their plantations as English leverage against the Dutch in the scramble for Connecticut and its rich fur trade. The same year, while visiting London, John Winthrop Jr. received a letter from his father that creatively interpreted the Pequot rejection of the Bay Colony’s terms as their submission to the latter’s sovereign jurisdiction in the Connecticut River Valley. The younger Winthrop next sought an audience with the Saybrook Company, a group of puritan merchants and investors who had backed the earl of Warwick’s various colonial projects; the company also received another emissary from the colonies, Plymouth’s former governor Edward Winslow. With the promise of future profits in fur, Winslow lobbied the company to partner with Plymouth in waging an offensive war against the Pequots. Obviously impressed by the prospect of colonizing western New England, the Saybrook Company launched a new project to establish a fur-trading post and eventually a colony at the mouth of the Connecticut River. Having invested £1500 in the project, Saltonstall directed the recruitment and provisioning of the first wave of Saybrook soldier-settlers. He also enlisted his former Coleman Street pastor John Davenport, then in Dutch exile, to recruit a commander for the Connecticut garrison from the ranks of English soldiers fighting against the Spanish on the Continent. The reverend ultimately chose Lieutenant Lyon Gardiner, then serving under the prince of Orange. With Davenport’s help, Saltonstall also enlisted another Dutch exile, Hugh Peter, who ended up migrating to New England as a Saybrook Company agent. The godly London merchant Matthew Craddock negotiated with the Privy Council for the passage of Henry Vane, who came to New England as a representative for the Saybrook Company, although his subsequent election to the governorship of Massachusetts compelled him to divest his company interests. As a Saybrook investor noted, Vane left England for “conscience’s sake” and not for profits in fur. Arriving in October 1635 in a vessel commanded by William Pierce, a Bay Colonist who traded throughout the English Atlantic, the younger John Winthrop and Lt. Gardiner set about the construction of Fort Saybrook, while Peter settled in Salem. Vane took up residence in Boston, where, as we have seen, he quickly found himself enthralled by the gospel preached by Anne Hutchinson.44 Vane’s election to the governorship in 1636 demoted Winthrop to deputy governor and compromised the latter’s ability to control events on the Connecticut frontier. Winthrop soon remedied this situation through his arbitrary creation of a “Standing Council” of three leaders, an action unwarranted by the Bay Colony charter. Together with his partner on the council, the bull-headed ex-governor Thomas Dudley, Winthrop used the body to

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manipulate the neophyte Vane, the third councilor, who had no experience in any governmental affairs, let alone ones colonial. In July 1636, the Standing Council persuaded the bewildered young governor to step up pressure on the Pequots, demanding the delivery of Captain Stone’s murderers and a payment in wampum that would have exceeded 50 percent of the Bay Colony’s own tax revenue. A month later, the Standing Council ordered John Endicott to lead the militia against a set of Pequot tributaries who had allegedly murdered another English trader, John Oldham. Having bungled this operation, which took place on Block Island, Endicott moved on to Saybrook, where Lt. Gardiner looked at him as if he had gone mad when he announced his intention to attack the Pequots with his puny contingent. The Pequots, learning that Endicott planned to kill women and children along with warriors, waited out the impulsive commander; when Endicott returned to the Bay Colony with his troops, the Pequots began a bloody siege of Fort Saybrook and launched murderous raids on other Connecticut settlements. So lay the situation in the spring of 1637, with Pequots on the frontier and antinomians at home standing between the magisterial rulers of the Bay Colony and a future of orderly and expansive godly prosperity in America.45 A s Saybrook lay under siege, the General Court brought the antinomian John Wheelwright forward to answer charges of sedition, setting off the “combustions in the commonwealth” that the minister had predicted in his Fast Day sermon. As a determined supporter of the defendant and a critic of magisterial interference in religious affairs, Governor Vane refused to cooperate in the March 1637 proceedings. The court nonetheless convicted Wheelwright of contempt and sedition and stacked the political deck against the antinomian faction in the elections scheduled for that May, moving them from Boston, an antinomian stronghold, to Newtown, where the antinomians’ nemesis Thomas Shepard presided over the church. Wheelwright’s supporters, led by the future Fifth Monarchist William Aspinwall, responded to this arbitrary move by politically organizing the antinomian opposition. Aspinwall mobilized the people through a petitioning campaign, a time-honored liberty in the English political tradition reflecting an active form of popular sovereignty through which the people could pressure government at the local and national levels to secure the public good. With the mobilization of a determined faction led by the governor and the deacon of the First Church, the antinomians looked toward the May election as a faceoff for political control in the Bay Colony.46

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On May 17, election day, the court scribe recorded that “there was great danger of a tumult” as tempers flared between Vane’s and Winthrop’s factions. The court declined to read Aspinwall’s petition to the assembly; Vane read it anyway, to the raucous cheers of his supporters. The petition demanded that the court “make it appear to us and all the world . . . wherein the sedition [of Wheelwright] lies, or else acquit our brother of such a censure.” It went on to liken the “enemy of free grace” to “Satan” and warned the court, citing Psalm 105:114–15, to “consider the danger of meddling against the prophets of God.” Winthrop’s reply, which he tendered six months later, accused Aspinwall and his petitioners of trying to “overthrow the foundation of our commonwealth”; petitioning had become sedition in the rarefied political culture of puritan New England. But during the elections at Newtown, Winthrop took an even bolder course; against the protests of the antinomians, he led his faction to the other side of the common and proceeded to have himself elected governor. This occasioned some fisticuffs between the colony’s freemen as “fierce speeches” between the contending sides heated passions to the point where “some laid hands on others.” When the dust cleared, Winthrop and his faction controlled the court, which refused to seat its newly elected members, the antinomians Vane, Aspinwall, and Coddington. Culminating in the showdown at Newtown, the court’s actions that spring illustrated how far it would undermine the rule of English law to preserve, as Shepard said, the “rule of life for a Christian” commonwealth.47 Winthrop’s election, a clear victory for the magisterial faction, threw down the gauntlet for the colonial onslaught against the Pequots. Shortly after reinstalling himself as governor, Winthrop ordered Bay Colony troops under Captain John Underhill to join a larger force of Connecticut militia commanded by Captain John Mason in an attack on the Pequots. Mohegan and Narragansett Indians would supply additional reinforcements for the English, the help of the latter secured largely by Roger Williams. Pastor John Wilson of First Boston Church, one of Anne Hutchinson’s chief legalist targets, volunteered to serve as the expedition’s chaplain. But with the crucial exception of Captain Underhill, a free grace stalwart, the antinomians refused to go to war under Wilson, indicative of both the radicals’ low opinion of their pastor and their view that the Pequots hardly presented an immediate threat to the community.48 On May 26, 1637, just two weeks after Henry Vane’s defeat at Newtown, the massacre at Fort Mystic described at the outset of this chapter took place. Underhill recounted how the slaughter produced a “most doleful cry” from

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the victims who “were burnt in the fort . . . men, women and children.” The Indians who did make it out of the fort, as Captain Under recorded, were “received on the point of a sword” by the soldiers. The Narragansetts, watching in horror, cried out, “Mach it, Mach it,” which Underhill interpreted to mean “it is naught because it kills too many men.” Mason, who had served on the Continent under the future New Model Army commander Thomas Fairfax, appreciated that the politicians back home chose not to “bind” the soldiers “up into too narrow a compass” but left battlefield tactics to the discretion of those on the battlefield itself. The carnage that this broad “compass” led to at Fort Mystic continued over the summer as the combined forces of Plymouth, the Connecticut settlements, and the Bay Colony hunted down surviving Pequots. The colonists, as later reports related, wanted to “root out” the tribe, to wipe it off the face of the earth, they “being of the accursed race of Ham,” a biblical apostate whose descendants had been consigned to enslavement and destruction.49 A generation earlier in Ireland, English conquistadors had waded in the blood of their “barbarous” enemies. Flowers of the English Renaissance such as Henry Sidney and Humphrey Gilbert were knighted for their service there, having “slaughter[ed] all who resisted . . . not sparing their women and children.” The foot soldiers of English humanism regarded the Irish as “uncivil and cruel.” They conducted themselves “like beasts, void of law and all good order . . . more uncivil, more uncleanly, more barbarous, and more brutish in their customs and demeanors” than any people “in any other part of the world.” In the Pequot War, the English in New England, like their predecessors in colonial Ireland, believed that to subdue the savage, the civilized should not be held to their own standards of civilization. But as any person who has read the correspondence of Roger Williams can attest, this barbaric hypocrisy was recognized as such in its own day.50 Over the course of the ruthless campaign, it became clear to Williams that the war’s true objective lay not in justly punishing the murderers of Captains Stone and Oldham but in unjustly taking Indian land through the indiscriminate slaughter, enslavement, and subjugation of the entire Pequot people. The reference to the “curse of Ham” is telling in this regard, as it had long served in the early modern era as a justification for the enslavement of Africans; English colonists now transferred this providential sanction to Native Americans. On June 21, roughly a month after what he described as “the slaughter” at Mystic, Williams petitioned Winthrop on behalf of the Narragansetts, who plead that Pequots taken captive “be not enslaved, like those who are taken in war; but (as they say is their gen-

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eral custom) be used kindly, have houses and goods and fields given them.” Scripture justified the enslavement of prisoners taken in a just war, as Williams knew, although the English never enslaved their prisoners taken on the Continent during the Thirty Years’ War, or even those taken in Ireland in the sixteenth century. Within the new American colonial context, where the godly waged total war against heathens, the saints seized upon the biblical tradition sanctioning the enslavement of foreign prisoners and placed dozens of Pequots, the “heathen” “savages” they did not kill, in perpetual bondage. On this question of the “perpetual slavery” of “captives,” however, Williams drew a different conclusion, writing Winthrop in regard to the Pequots that “after a due time of training up to labor and restraint, they ought to be set free.” Williams also resented how the Bay Colony began turning on its Narragansett allies, as if the colonists felt that the war served as a kind of providential dispensation for the extirpation of the entire indigenous population. As puritan forces continued their onslaught on the southwestern frontier, Williams wrote to Winthrop on July 5 that “innocent blood cries at Connecticut.” Citing 2 Kings 14:5–6, Williams reminded Winthrop that “[t]he fathers shall not be put to death for the children, nor the children be put to death for the fathers; but every man shall be put to death for his own sin.” Beyond the pillaging and murder, the evidence suggests that captive Pequot women were raped; it remains indisputable that other captives were enslaved, most of them in New England, while seventeen were shipped out to Providence Island. “The general speech is, all must be rooted out,” Williams continued in another letter to Winthrop, taking the occasion to observe that “our countrymen have almost quite forgotten our great pretenses to King and State and all the world” of seeking to convert the “souls” of New England’s Indians; instead the saints seemed resolved to undertake their general destruction.51 In hindsight, we can see through the blood and smoke that the Pequot War played a catalytic part in the invention of two institutions at the heart of early modern English colonialism, racialized slavery and racialized savagery. Williams, however, in perhaps his greatest ethical and intellectual achievements, broke with these traditions in the midst of their very invention.52 A r r i v i n g fresh from the frontier on August 5, the divines Thomas Hooker and John Wilson rode triumphantly into Boston with a parcel of Indian slaves in tow; having weltered in the blood of Satan’s heathen legions in Connecticut, the clerics now looked forward to battling the heretics who dwelled within the camps of the Lord’s chosen. A synod designed to hash

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out the differences between the antinomians and their opponents took place shortly after their arrival. To little effect, one of John Cotton’s most devoted free grace disciples, Aspinwall, protested that the antinomians in Boston should not be prosecuted in respect to “the tenderness of consciences,” a signal that the debate over free grace had turned in part, however haltingly, to the question whether dissenters should be allowed some kind of formal latitude in the colony. Cotton, however, under intense pressure from his peers, short-circuited the initiative of his acolyte Aspinwall and closed ranks with Shepard and the clergy. As Winthrop wrote about Cotton’s new stance, “this sudden change was much observed.” Coleman Street’s John Davenport, who had arrived in Boston with thirty former residents of the Ward that June, preached the synod’s final sermon, exhorting the assembled godly “not to condemn nor despise one another in differences of weakness,” which, given Cotton’s abrupt change of heart, must have had a hollow ring to Aspinwall’s antinomian delegation. Having successfully turned Cotton, the synod had set the stage for Wheelwright and Hutchinson’s General Court trial in November, which convened in the far-from-neutral confines of Thomas Shepard’s house in Newtown.53 During the trial, legalist magistrates tried to make political capital out of the antinomians’ refusal to join the Pequot campaign. Wheelwright’s faction, the court lamented, gave “great discouragement to the service.” The enthusiasts had weakened the godly’s defenses against the “barbarians,” placing their own interests over the community’s safety, which constituted a grave breach of the colony’s covenant. Appealing to the “King’s Majesty” for a reprieve, Wheelwright protested the proceedings by pointing out their inconsistencies with the common law. This incensed the magistrates, who perceived that their own sovereignty in America flowed from God and not England’s ancient laws; their rule had kept “a peaceable and comely order in all affairs in the churches, and civil state” before Wheelwright and Hutchinson’s gospel had “spread . . . into the families,” setting “divisions between husband and wife, and other relations there.” Preying upon antinomian desertion in the face of the Pequots, the alleged “common enemy,” the court declared that the “necessity of the peace” required Wheelwright’s banishment. As the discussion on the bench turned toward Wheelwright’s exile, evidence surfaced that Aspinwall had secretly written and organized the petition on the minister’s behalf earlier that spring. Called to answer for this alleged indiscretion, Aspinwall reminded the colonial government that free men had the right to petition courts for redress of grievances, and that both Paul and Christ had been counted as “pestilent fellows,” “movers of

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sedition,” and the “ring-leaders of a sect” for preaching the gospel of free grace. Conveniently overlooking that he had acted as a private man when he moved to have Aspinwall purged from the court after the deacon had been duly elected to it earlier that May, Winthrop replied that “it was great arrogance of any private man thus openly to advance his own judgment before the court.” For both his petition and his “insolent and turbulent carriage,” the magistrates promptly banished Aspinwall after doing the same to Wheelwright, accompanying the sentence with a salvo of cutting insults.54 When the court finally got to Anne Hutchinson and plumbed the depths of her antinomian beliefs, she succinctly attributed them to the Eatonite doctrine of experiential knowledge, stating to the disbelief of her inquisitors that her spiritual convictions had come to her “by an immediate revelation . . . by the voice of [God’s] spirit into my soul.” Winthrop exclaimed that “this . . . thing . . . hath been the root of all the mischief . . . all these tumults and troubles . . . it is the most desperate enthusiasm in the world . . . it overthrows all.” The court quickly proceeded to banish Hutchinson alongside Wheelwright and Aspinwall, prompting Hutchinson to ask, “[W]herefore I am banished?” Winthrop’s reply gave the lie to the farce at hand, revealing the entirely arbitrary nature of the proceedings: “Say no more, the court knows wherefore of and is satisfied.”55 Hutchinson faced one more grueling ordeal: her excommunication from Boston’s First Church. Between the banishment proclaimed by the court in November 1637 and her March 1638 excommunication, she lived in John Cotton’s house along with John Davenport in what could only have been an excruciatingly uncomfortable situation. When the excommunication testimonies began, Davenport pursued an approach more accommodating than those employed by John Wilson and Thomas Shepard. At one point, Hutchinson even seemed to close with Davenport on the finer points of resurrection theology, as Hutchinson had been charged with the Familist heresy of mortalism, something legalists also hurled at the Eatonites on Coleman Street. However, Shepard and Wilson, joined by Hugh Peter and John Cotton, continued to press until they trapped Hutchinson in a maze of doctrinal minutiae, prompting Davenport to accede to their preordained verdict. Throughout both of her trials, Hutchinson persisted in defending her liberty to follow the law God had written on the hearts of his saints. Winthrop described her positions as “bottomless revelations” that, “if they be allowed in one thing, must be admitted a rule in all things.” This woman and her faction, therefore, were “not subject to control.” Clearly, the clergy and magistrates’ chief concern lay not with Hutchinson’s private beliefs but

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in the challenge they presented to the patriarchal, magisterial order; they described the effects of this challenge as sheer disorder; the antinomians, on the other hand, understood them as true reformation.56 “A n d so the Lord,” Thomas Shepard wrote, “. . . wrought a great change among us, having delivered the country from war with the Indians and Familists, who rose and fell together.” Although the Shepard-Winthrop faction ultimately prevailed in managing the religious challenge mounted by Hutchinson and her allies, they felt less secure about the political ideas that Henry Vane and his supporters such as William Aspinwall had enlisted to challenge the Bay Colony magistracy.57 But even professed political opponents of the antinomians grew concerned about the court’s defiance of the rule of law; among these were Israel Stoughton, a slave-owning veteran of the Pequot War and a definite critic of antinomian belief. Rising to the occasion, Winthrop responded with a manuscript titled “Liberty and the Weale Publick Reconciled.” Here the governor justified the court’s refusal to hear Aspinwall’s petition for Wheelwright immediately before the Newtown elections. The matter turned, Winthrop wrote, on the antinomians’ claim that the court had proceeded with the election without the consent of the people, thus placing them in political “bondage.” “It is objected,” Winthrop wrote, “that the court might have heard the petition first . . . seeing it was for the people’s liberty.” “That is true, they might . . . had they so pleased,” admitted the governor in an exceptionally frank and flippant assertion of the magisterial prerogative. But rather than rest his defense on the court’s lawful discretionary authority, the clever Winthrop turned the tables on his opponents, manipulating their populist position to advance his own. The “whole body of freemen” had assembled at Newtown, where Winthrop recalled that “the major part being for election, it may be truly said the people or the court did order that election should proceed before the petition be heard.” Winthrop at the very least stretched the truth here, since he had moved the election to Shephard’s Newtown to keep antinomians in the minority. But, as Winthrop continued, since no court existed during the election itself, the freemen themselves constituted the court, and so by citing what he alleged to be the majority’s decision to dismiss the petition, Winthrop recast the suppression of the antinomian political challenge as the will of the people, expressed democratically on election day. As freemen in a “popular state” where each “gives an implicit consent to whatsoever the major part shall establish” through the electoral process, Winthrop warned, the antinomians were “bound unto by their

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oath” to submit to the popular will as expressed through the court’s subsequent proceedings, namely, the political retrenchment of their enemies. In a case study of the subtlety that made him a master politician and Massachusetts’s governor four times over, Winthrop flirted with a democratic variant of popular sovereignty to legitimize a government committed to the Magisterial Reformation.58 But Winthrop also came out in direct support of the magisterial prerogative when he found such an approach more effective or appropriate. In a tract titled A Defense of an Order of Court Made in the Year 1637, he justified the restrictions the court had placed on antinomian integration into the colony at the height of the controversy. In laying out his defense, Winthrop first defined the relationship between magisterial discretion and liberty in a godly commonwealth. According to the governor, the foundation of the people’s liberty rested on the “free consent” they gave “to cohabit together, under one government for their mutual safety and welfare. . . . None . . . can claim privilege” to the prerogative in the “body politic,” “but by free consent”; thus those who had “voluntarily” bound themselves together through the covenant had forever consented to the exercise of such magisterial authority. Tying the law against antinomian immigration to his magisterial concept of commonwealth government, Winthrop believed magistrates needed to wield the prerogative in accordance with their consciences, as guided by the Word of God and their duty to preserve the public good; citizens, having elected their magistrates and covenanted together to submit to magisterial authority, could thus submit in good conscience to the decisions of their courts, even though they might disagree with them. Winthrop concluded that the magistrates had defended both individual liberty and the “welfare of the whole” by keeping out migrants who sided with “Mr. Wheelwright” and, earlier on, the “dangerous” “Mr. Williams,” men who “cannot stand with external peace and who “make people look at their magistrates, ministers and brethren as enemies to Christ.”59 Winthrop’s political rival Henry Vane would not let him have the last word in the controversy. In a manuscript titled “A Brief Answer to a Certain Declaration,” he took on Winthrop’s defense of the sovereign, “unlimited . . . will and discretion of . . . magistrates . . . not regulated.” Vane argued that such a view violated the sovereignty of both King Jesus and King Charles, thereby turning a discussion skeptical of the migrants’ godly character into a conversation about the dangers of unlimited magisterial discretion. Having himself been turned out of office through the court’s arbitrary exercise of its prerogative power, Vane intoned that “members of a

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commonwealth may not seek out all means that may conduce to the welfare of the body, but all lawful and due means, according to the charter they hold by, either from God or King, from both.” Winthrop claimed that “which the King is pleased to bestow upon us,” namely the royal patent, “is truly our own,” meaning Charles had ceded ultimate sovereignty to the Bay Colony magistracy. Vane disagreed and contended that English law remained operative within the colony, writing that “the King’s Christian subjects have by right his majesties patent to come over and plant in places not inhabited.” From the foundation of royal sovereignty in colonial affairs, Vane raised the argument that antinomians, being “fellow subjects to one and the same prince,” could not legally or justly be subjected to the unregulated decrees of colonial magistrates.60 Winthrop had argued that magistrates needed to exercise their prerogative in restricting antinomian immigration “to keep off whatsoever appears to tend to our ruin and damage.” Vane reminded Winthrop and his cohort vis-à-vis their banishment of John Wheelwright for sedition that magistrates, chief priests, and Pharisees had condemned “our savior” to death as a seditionist through their own unlimited discretionary power. As the law of King Charles and King Jesus circumscribed the discretionary power of the colony’s magistracy, Vane held that it was thus bound “not to keep off whatsoever appears to tend to their ruin, but what really doth so.” Moreover, in a Christian commonwealth such as the Bay Colony, the magistrates had erred in two other related ways. Although they restricted the admission of convinced Christians, they allowed in “profane persons as rather do harden the Indians than be a means to their conversion. . . . Our cohabitation with [the Indians],” Vane continued, “may tend to their conversion and so to their eternal salvation.” In this way, Vane pointed out to Winthrop that his arbitrary rule had undermined the liberties of the colony’s freemen as well as its evangelistic mission to the Indians.61 Finally, Vane urged Winthrop to return to the history of the primitive church as a guide for handling religious controversy, one that would prove more just than the discretion of fallible magistrates. Echoing a point made earlier by Aspinwall, Vane reminded his adversary that “Paul and Silas were accused for turning the world upside down. . . . You except against [Wheelwright’s] opinions because they make divisions. The gospel which he or any man holds forth will cause divisions by accident.” So it was among the early Christians, who debated the admission of gentiles to the church. But, Vane wrote, in the case of the Roman centurion Cornelius, after he “and his company had received the Holy Ghost . . . the right which they had to the

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covenant was evidenced. It is not now left to the discretion” of men. From the account of Cornelius’s conversion in the tenth chapter of Acts came the verse perhaps most quoted by advocates of the Radical Reformation, “that God is no respecter of persons.” God’s judgment, in other words, did not follow the conventions of men, conventions that antinomians around the English Atlantic had committed themselves to upset in the name of reformation. Accordingly, Vane concluded his tract by debunking Winthrop’s assertion that Wheelwright’s message exceeded the danger of Roger Williams’s preaching. Vane replied to Winthrop’s point facetiously, observing that the gospel was “more dangerous than that for which Mr. Williams was banished.” Moreover, in the case of Anne Hutchinson’s brother-in-law, “we know nothing which Mr. Wheelwright held dissonant from the gospel.” From the antinomians’ perspective, Wheelwright and Williams had dissented from only the seditious gospel of magisterial discretion, an act that through the sufficiency of the Holy Spirit upheld the essential sovereignty of King Jesus.62 A f t e r the Antinomian Controversy and the Pequot War, the histories of New England and Providence Island became increasingly interconnected. The planters on the island, reeling from a slave rebellion in 1638, considered selling some of the more troublesome slaves off to Virginia and New England. Similarly, the island’s pirates began looking to New England as a market for their ill-gotten gains. In September 1638, the Providence Island pirate “Captain Newman” arrived in the Bay Colony at the head of a small fleet of Spanish vessels that he had taken as prizes. He sold a cargo of tallow and hides to eager buyers in Boston. In September 1639, Providence Island’s most famous pirate, Captain William Jackson, arrived in the bay with Maurice Thompson, the puritan tobacco planter and slave trader who owned estates and slaves in Virginia, Barbados, and St. Kitt’s. They sold their booty of sugar and indigo for the considerable sum of 1,400 pounds. Thompson presumably visited his brother Robert, a Bay Colonist, and added another venture to his bulging portfolio during his brief stay, a fishing concern on Cape Ann. Judging by his journal entries, Winthrop regarded these transactions as boons to New England’s faltering economy. But at the same time, he became increasingly dismayed about the degenerating effect that the West Indian trade had on the Bay Colonists’ fidelity to the covenant.63 After noting that colonists from Virginia, Providence, and other “Caribee islands” sometimes resettled in the Bay Colony, Winthrop went on to loathe how saints sojourning in their new world could also move from Massachu-

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setts to West Indian islands, drawn by the lure of easy riches. He observed caustically how the goods that Captains Pierce, Newman, and Jackson had pilfered in the West Indies had mesmerized the saints once they had reached the marketplace of the New Jerusalem. They “were so taken with the ease and plenty of those countries,” the “ease” made possible, of course, by piracy and slave labor, that “many of them sold their estates” in New England to “transport themselves to Providence.” Furthermore, Lord Saye and Sele, a benefactor of the Saybrook Company and a chief Providence Island projector, had been “disparaging” New England “to divert men from coming to us . . . to draw them to the West Indies.” When Winthrop complained to Saye and Sele, the noble wrote back that Winthrop should desert New England, as it formed only a temporary haven for the godly, who were truly “called” to plant Providence Island. But providence itself, Winthrop reported, seemed to favor New England, as a Spanish force destroyed the English colony on Providence Island in 1641, thus denying the Massachusetts saints planning to move there the treasure they expected to gain under the colony’s new governor, the Bay Colony’s own John Humfrey.64 E v e n before the Spanish sacked Providence Island in 1641, the colony had lost much of its godly luster in the eyes of its most committed puritans. The profane ways of the island’s pirate crews disconcerted the saints, who nonetheless depended upon them to supply their plantations with slaves. Still other puritans broke ranks with their coreligionists, reproaching them for the ungodly, dehumanizing effects that the islands’ evolution into a slave society had on both masters and the Africans whom they had enslaved. New England’s development in the 1630s proved very different than Providence’s, as it opened up a new theater of conflict between the proponents of Radical and Magisterial Reformation. Although Anne Hutchinson’s teachings were theologically in tune with the Coleman Street antinomians we explored in chapter 1, Massachusetts’s spiritists did not, like Samuel How in London, launch into an explicit social gospel condemning the exploitation of the poor at the hands of the wealthy and well educated. They focused instead on purifying the gospel of free grace from the doctrinal corruptions of the New England clergy. But in order to realize their objectives, antinomians in New England in the late 1630s, unlike their counterparts in London, could organize themselves as a potent political constituency, with Governor Henry Vane and a deacon of First Church and Oxford MA, William Aspinwall, leading the way. The fact that the saints lived within the bounds of a reformation-minded colonial commonwealth made such po-

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litical organization possible in New England, while London’s puritan community, especially its antinomian underground, endured persecution and political marginalization under the personal rule of Charles I and his chief lieutenant, Archbishop William Laud. Although the nature of free grace preoccupied the disputants in New England’s Antinomian Controversy, even the explicitly religious dimensions of the political crisis it occasioned amounted to more than an intense theological tangle over salvific doctrine. In the end, the turmoil revealed that the saints were falling out over how to apply the fundamental tenet of their faith, the golden rule or “royal law,” within their own community as well as in relation to their Native American neighbors. While most colonists initially desired to live peaceably with one another and with the natives, history revealed that this was not to be the case. Preserving the Bay Colony covenant along its original magisterial lines required the magistracy to turn dissent into sedition, as Roger Williams first discovered when he stood fast for liberty of conscience and the civil sovereignty of Indian societies. The proponents of the Magisterial Reformation thus preserved the “perfect bond of love” in ways that refused Christian charity to the supporters of Radical Reformation, exiling them as a heretical and seditious fifth column that weakened the patriarchal community of saints as it faced down and began racializing a “savage” enemy, the Pequot Indians, on the colonial frontier. Both seditionists and savages in this way became the “common enemy” of the Magisterial Reformation in America. In New England, then, suppressing the Radical Reformation depended interchangeably on the invention of sedition’s meaning in a reformed commonwealth and the forging of a racial hierarchy in the crucible of the colonial frontier. The colonial creation of the interdependent foils of sedition and savagery thus guided the magisterial faction’s first foray into defining puritan orthodoxy in America, an attempt that, in their eyes, made the preservation of the patriarchal sensibilities of early modern English society indispensable to advancing the kingdom of God beyond the seas.

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“To Engage You All to Rise Up in Your Might” The Outbreak of the English Revolution

on de c e m b e r 27, 1641, John Lilburne took up his sword and joined the crush of commoners rushing westward through London. Stopping outside the City gates, the throngs, thousands strong, converged at the palaces of Whitehall and Westminster, where king and Parliament conducted the government of the nation. There, at the literal center of English political life, Lilburne and his crew melted into the roiling multitude. The crowd, organized in no small part by militant Protestant stalwarts from Coleman Street Ward, had gathered to contest the king’s rejection of the Grand Remonstrance and the Root and Branch Petition. These instruments of reform, largely the work of Coleman Street’s Isaac Pennington and the former Bay Colony governor Henry Vane, took special aim at the House of Lords, the royal courts and councils, and the bishops who vied for control over these bodies. Although Vane, Pennington, and their peers had called upon Londoners to turn out en masse in support of these measures, the thousands who took to the streets hardly saw themselves as the mere pawns of the parliamentary leadership. Over the previous two years, through petitioning campaigns, public demonstrations, and the operation of an underground printing press, sections of the militant Protestant commonality had already constituted themselves as part of the emerging revolutionary body politic. For four days outside Westminster Abbey, the Houses of Parliament, and the royal residence at Whitehall, apprentices, soldiers, sailors, shopkeepers, tradesmen, and laborers–the working poor and middling sorts of London— engaged in running battles with gentlemen of the court faction, their servants, and mercenaries fresh from Scotland, already known, derisively, as 83

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“cavaliers.” As the fighting spread around the Houses of Parliament, Lilburne and a ragged company armed with clubs and swords invaded Westminster Hall. Jeered by army officers loyal to the court, the young insurgent and his impromptu troop chose the moment to petition for the release of their friends who had been imprisoned after an earlier melee at Westminster. But far from resorting to the deferential language of the English petitioning tradition, Lilburne’s rugged band tendered their plea with a stream of “Billingsgate,” the profane jargon of the East London docklands, where many of the company lived. Before long, taunts, jeers, and profane petitions gave way to blows with swords, clubs, and cudgels. After Lilburne’s force had been pushed out of Westminster Hall, sharp reports of gunshots began echoing of the stone walls enclosing the palace courtyard. The sound and the flying lead scattered the crowd as four of the protesters dropped to the ground after being hit by bullets. As their blood flowed over the paving stones, the people managed to regroup and, with the encouragement of Lilburne and other charismatic leaders, stood their ground against the cavaliers, who slashed their way into the crowd, their steel swords flashing in the weak winter light.1 The violent drama at Westminster became a signal event in the revolution that erupted in England in the early 1640s. As we will see, the timing of the revolution owed to a series of unpredictable events that unfolded across the three kingdoms of England, Ireland, and Scotland. The revolutionaries’ grievances, however, stretched back at least to the 1620s, when unresolved issues from the Petition of Right debates, Laudian persecution, and the crown’s frustration of militant Protestant ambitions in the Spanish West Indies combined to create a constitutional crisis in church and state that could no longer be deferred once Charles I chose to end his eleven-year “personal rule” in 1640. Although it’s now grown wearisome to say that these crises did not lead inevitably to revolution, a constitutional revolution actually did take place in England between 1640 and 1642 that led directly to the first English civil war (1642–46). As we will discover, Coleman Street’s puritan elite, not least due to political connections forged through investments in Atlantic colonization and commerce, would ascend to the ranks of the revolutionary leadership in Parliament and the City of London.2 In the urban geography of Revolutionary London, Coleman Street Ward served as a focal point for popular politicization and organization, playing host to some of the most important petitioning campaigns and crowd actions of the revolutionary crisis of 1640–42. With its strategic location between

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the Guildhall and the Royal Exchange, the ward became a center of power for the City’s revolutionary elite, a cadre led by Coleman Street’s own Isaac Pennington. But as Pennington and other well-placed revolutionary leaders from the ward and elsewhere in London soon discovered, the commoners that they called into action also possessed the will and capacity to organize and direct their own parts in the revolutionary insurgency. Dozens of times between 1640 and 1642, thousands of people joined in unruly protests that often turned into physical attacks on members of the prerogative courts, the Houses of Parliament, and the episcopacy. Staging their own demonstrations or participating in those called by elites, the saints among the revolutionary rank and file in London made use of conventicles and their own underground printing press to promote opposition to the ancien régime. In a case study of popular politicization at the outset of the Revolution, we will see how the underground printer and future Leveller Richard Overton, operating mostly out of Coleman Street Ward, recruited the ghost of Samuel How for service in the Revolution, transforming the late cobbler into “the Cobbler” to create a radical icon through the medium of print. In the process, Overton refashioned How into a plebeian symbol of the English Revolution, a representation of defiant resistance from below that fused the older struggle for Radical Reformation with the political agenda of England’s most militant revolutionaries. Overton’s illicit press and the crowd actions that it helped inspire played instrumental parts in generating the massive popular political pressure that made the constitutional revolution of 1640–42 possible, as crowds of informed and organized commoners acted according to the conviction that they existed as a legitimate part of the political nation. I n the spring of 1639, Charles I failed in his attempt to impose the Book of Common Prayer and episcopal church government on the largely Presbyterian Kingdom of Scotland, a misguided move that plunged England and Scotland into “the Bishops’ Wars.” The king’s troubles in Scotland soon spread to England, where the monarch’s extraparliamentary schemes to raise revenue for his Scottish war met with stiff, popular resistance. Opposition to these “forced loans” began making life difficult for the lord mayor of London, Coleman Street’s Maurice Abbot, who found the citizens less than enthusiastic about being taxed illegally to fund a counterreformation campaign against the Scots. Only eighteen Coleman Street rate payers paid up, the smallest percentage of all the City wards. Following one of the king’s favorite tactics for dealing with those who opposed his revenue schemes,

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Lord Mayor Abbot threw three of the ward’s nonsubscribers into Newgate without trial. But Abbot also recognized that resistance to the court moved beyond tax boycotts, and at social levels far below those of Coleman Street’s wealthy ratepayers. In particular, Abbot took note of how John Lilburne and his “friend” and “servant” Katherine Hadley were helping to organize the commonality of the City against the king’s campaign in Scotland.3 Lilburne still languished in the Fleet, enduring both incarceration and periodic torture for distributing books that supposedly encouraged sedition against “Christ and his Kingdom and . . . the King’s Most Excellent Majesty’s Prerogative Royal.” Seizing upon his fame as a godly martyr to draw attention to his captivity as well as the perceived injustice of the Bishops’ Wars, Lilburne managed to compose two tracts behind bars, A Cry for Justice and A Letter to the Apprentices, that exhorted godly young working men, a self-image that Lilburne romantically projected on the London crowd, to oppose the bishops’ unholy war against the Scottish Covenanters. During the Whitsun holiday in May 1639, Katherine Hadley smuggled Lilburne’s two manuscripts out of the Fleet. With the assistance of several sympathizers, she published the manuscripts, most likely on the illicit press the radicals had recently established in Coleman Street Ward. She then chose to distribute what Laud called these “very seditious papers” at a spot calculated to do the most damage, “the wrestling place” in Moorfields in the northern section of Coleman Street Ward, a likely spot to find young men of a godly hue and combative spirit. The strategy worked. “Many thousands” of apprentices, at least by Lilburne’s reckoning, responded to the exhortations in his tracts. The apprentices marched on Lambeth Palace, where they besieged Laud with demands for Lilburne’s release. With no response forthcoming, they proceeded to riot amidst angry condemnations of the archbishop’s abuses of power. Maurice Abbot later claimed that the “transcendent dangerousness” of the crowd that Lilburne and Hadley had together inspired in Moorfields provided a “kindle” that threatened to “set the City and the whole Kingdom in a flame.” Abbot responded to the incendiary challenge by declaring martial law in London and sending constables fanning out across the city in search of illicit arms; for good measure the lord mayor had Hadley thrown summarily into the Poultry Comptor, a prison for debtors, felons, and vagrants.4 Although a peace had been struck between the English and Scots at Berwick in June 1639, a new Scottish army invaded England in April 1640, forcing Charles to convene his first Parliament (known later as the “Short Parliament”) in eleven years. To the king’s dismay, however, the House of

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Commons made it clear that no funds would be forthcoming for the Scottish war until the king agreed to stop imprisoning his political opponents and to reform the church and his revenue schemes. The Providence Island Company director John Pym led this effort in the House of Commons, while his political partners and fellow colonialist the earl of Warwick helped to do the same in the House of Lords. Pym and company bundled their demands for reform together with new calls for a privateering war in the Spanish West Indies, a demand that had been made consistently by godly members of Parliament since the early 1620s. The parliamentary clique gathering around Pym thus renewed the quest, first articulated clearly during the Petition of Right controversies, to combine religious reform and the curtailment of the royal prerogative with an aggressive, militant Protestant foreign policy in the Caribbean.5 Moving in the opposite direction, Charles refused to buckle to the demands for reform and rejected his critics’ plans for a West Indian war against the Spanish. In the king’s view, war for the time being consisted of crushing dissent within his Scottish kingdom, not singeing the Spaniard’s beard and picking his pocket in the Caribbean. Dismissing Parliament only three weeks after calling it into session, Charles dashed widespread hopes that he would address the grievances that had plagued the nation for the last two decades. To add insult to injury, the king allowed the bishops’ council to remain in session when custom called for it to dissolve with Parliament; as a result, the prelates issued seventeen new canons substantiating Laud’s innovations while verifying Charles’s claim to divine-right kingship, which prompted a petition of protest from puritan divines organized by Coleman Street’s John Goodwin.6 As events would later reveal, Charles should have listened to the warning of his capable new lieutenant, Thomas Wentworth, not to dissolve the Parliament he had just summoned. Charles had made Wentworth the earl of Strafford in January 1640 after recalling him from his tenure as lord lieutenant of Ireland, where his rigor in raising troops and revenue had made him a star in the king’s eyes and an enemy to seemingly all outside the inner circles of the Stuart Court. In the public eye, the earl of Strafford soon came to rival Archbishop Laud as the worst of the king’s “evil councilors”; but for the moment that May, the crowd concentrated its wrath on the archbishop. With high expectations for reform suddenly brought low by the dissolution of Parliament, the crowds descended again on the prelate’s manse in Lambeth. Bolstered by reinforcements transported by barge from Wapping, the angry mobs at the archbishop’s palace forced Laud to flee across the river to Whitehall, where

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he took refuge with the king. Laud’s flight from his own fortress marked a symbolic surrender to the “disorderly and rebellious assemblies” storming through London. The anticourt crowd consisted of sailors, deserted soldiers, apprentice weavers and wool-combers, cobblers, blacksmiths, poulterers, glaziers, and indeed, workers and tradesmen drawn from the widest of possible ranges. Although members of the mob saw their collective appearance on the streets as an embodied appeal for justice against ministerial tyranny, the king’s defenders and even many of Parliament’s most important reformers regarded the crowd as a seditious threat to the king and his court and, even more fundamentally, a danger to property and the peace of the nation. The scale and determination of the crowd nonplussed the earl of Leicester’s London correspondent, who wrote to his patron that he “never knew the subjects of England” to be “so much out of order.”7 Opposition to the Bishops’ Wars persisted well beyond May 1640 as resistance continued to unfold through overlapping constituencies, with London crowd riots giving way to mutinies by impressed soldiers, many of whom as Londoners themselves would have been present at the Lambeth Maytide disturbances. Without sufficient funds or volunteers for the Scottish war, Charles and Strafford sent the press gangs streaming out across the City and the south of England in attempt to raise an army of thirty thousand soldiers. Mounting England’s largest conscription drive to that point in the country’s history, however, proved almost as dangerous to the king’s cause as the Scots themselves. The troops impressed usually hailed from among the poorest sections of English society, “idle persons that were to be found in taverns, inns and alehouses,” jails, highways, and “in all counties, and in every street in London.” One regiment raised in Berkshire and Oxfordshire mutinied on its way through Northamptonshire, refusing to march any further. When their officers alternately ordered and begged them to continue, the men responded that “all was peace in Scotland,” that their conscription “was only a pretence to carry them some other” place where they would “be shipped and sold for slaves.” Viewing the massive conscription campaign against the backdrop of government policies that sent the poor across the Atlantic and into forced labor in the colonies, such assumptions among the soldiery were far less paranoid than was the pervasive fear among the saints that Charles I had become entangled in a “popish plot.” In London, City authorities housed army conscripts in Bridewell and assembled them for deployment at the Tower wharf. Their material poverty already a catalyst for desperate action, the impressed soldiers grew increasingly enraged at the prospect of being coerced to enforce the violent whims of crypto-

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Catholic bishops. These class, religious, and political resentments broke out into open mutinies even before the regiments left the City. Once the troop disturbances had been put down and the army started moving, the soldiers channeled their discontent into an iconoclastic rampage, pulling crucifixes from church walls, wrecking altar rails, and smashing statues and stained glass all the way to Scotland. The ragged and hungry soldiers made the most of the situation, taking full advantage of the rare access to abundant food, drink, and valuables that their newly armed mobility afforded them; in the guise of foraging, they pilfered as much they could carry, eat, and guzzle. But in the midst of their carousing the soldiers also took up the cause of the commonality. In Derbyshire and Yorkshire, troops pulled down enclosures, set fire to fencing, poached deer, and freed debtors and inmates from prisons and workhouses. The march north became one long trail of political sedition suffused with class-conscious militant Protestant rage, prompting the army’s commander, the earl of Northumberland, to write in despair that “the men that are pressed . . . are so mutinous” that they seemed “readier to draw their swords upon their officers than against the Scots.”8 In September 1640, with petitions for reform piling up at Whitehall and with the leveling spirit loose within a mutinous army, the lay preacher Samuel How died in prison. To prevent the Coleman Streeter’s funeral from becoming a political spectacle of antinomian sedition, justices of the peace forbade the cobbler’s burial in consecrated ground. As a result, How’s friends heard his funeral sermon preached from the back of a brewer’s cart on “a highway” in the East End environs of Shoreditch, where they then laid the unfortunate enthusiast to rest. A month after How’s death, two new political prisoners, Thomas Lambe and Edward Barber, joined John Lilburne behind bars. Lambe, a separatist soap boiler from Colchester, and Barber, a London merchant tailor, had already joined many of How’s former congregants on Coleman Street, where they presided over “dipping” conventicles that would later become the mainstay of London’s “General Baptist” congregations. Barber’s denial of infant baptism and Lambe’s anti-Laudian preaching in Colchester had attracted the unwanted attention of the Court of High Commission, which promptly whisked Barber into Newgate while it forced Lambe into a cell in Lilburne’s place of incarceration, the Fleet prison. Within a few years the three men would be working together in the Leveller movement.9 But already in September 1640, crowds sympathetic to the prisoners began squaring off against their enemies at St. Paul’s Cathedral, where the Court of High Commission convened in the Convocation House. The crowd

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of “common people,” organized in part by a network of London conventicles and puritan churches, began their demonstration in a mischievous fashion, quacking and chirping in mockery of two High Commission members, the unfortunately named Arthur Duck and Matthew Wren. When this avian-styled amusement lost its charm, the crowd turned violent and proceeded to smash its way into the Convocation House. Menacing the terrified commissioners with rough handling and wrathful reproaches, they forced Chancellor Duck to beat his proverbial wings “through a hole in a window,” which tore more holes in his suit of clothes. Eventually, the rioters “tore down all the benches in the consistory, and cried out that they ‘would have no bishop, nor no high commission.’” The “mutiny,” “insolencies,” and “seditious tumults” at St. Paul’s, as Archbishop Laud and the Privy Council called them, were blamed on antinomian conventiclers.10 With his army and his courts paralyzed by the seditious resistance of godly commoners, Charles caved in to the pressure and called another Parliament in November 1640, hoping to secure funds for his Scottish war. The Scots Covenanters helped force Charles’s hand here, but certainly no more than the bottom-up, socially subversive resistance organized by civilians and soldiers from a cross-section of the English population dominated by people with little or no property. Ordinary saints and poor commoners within and without the army had kept up the momentum for reform that the king had tried to cut off when he dissolved the Short Parliament; now, thanks in part to the persistence of the commonality in opposing the war with the Scots, Charles once again had to face the political music conducted by his political opponents in Parliament.11 So too did Charles’s opportunistic ally in Coleman Street Ward, the honorable gentleman Maurice Abbot. The House of Lords, soon after assembling that November in what would become known as the Long Parliament, called Abbot to the bar for abusing Katherine Hadley’s civil liberties a year before. In the changed context of the extraordinary and turbulent times, Abbot, one of the most powerful men in England, thus found himself in the odd position of having to defend what other lord mayors had simply taken as a matter of course: the imprisonment of a poor person, in this case a woman, for seditious behavior. Abbot’s reluctant appearance in the House of Lords, however, stemmed from an earlier initiative in the House of Commons involving John Lilburne. A still obscure squire from Cambridgeshire named Oliver Cromwell argued so strenuously for Lilburne’s release from the Fleet Prison that, as Sir Phillip Warwick wrote, “one would have believed the very government itself had been in danger.” Due mostly to Cromwell’s insistence, the House

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of Commons freed Lilburne, who promptly used his newfound liberty to press Hadley’s case against Abbot in the House of Lords. When the Lords agreed to hear Lilburne’s petition on behalf of Hadley in December 1640, “Sir Maurice,” as Lilburne wryly recalled, “came up” to Westminster “in the pomp and state of a quandom [former] Lord Mayor of London with an abundance of the City Officers,” including “the Bishop of Lincoln [and] divers Earls and Lords of that gang . . . to attend him and to plead” his case against the lowly Hadley. Lilburne made his own case for his imprisoned comrade, contending that in jailing her without charge, Abbot had violated the Petition of Right, which he called the magistrate’s “sure rule and guide.” Perhaps unexpectedly, the Lords found Lilburne convincing and ordered Abbot to compensate Hadley £10 for her stay in jail; Lilburne served the order to the lordly Abbot “at his house and received the money with his own hand,” a triumphant experience made all the more enjoyable when he handed the money over to Hadley.12 The event revealed both the dwindling influence of Abbot, who would die in 1642, and John Lilburne’s rising star in the interrelated political culture of the street, Parliament, and the underground press. The story also illustrates the indispensable and often unrecognized parts that godly women like Katherine Hadley played in the revolutionary politicization of the London crowd in the early 1640s, when the politics of the street and the political nation ex officio began to meet through mass mobilization against the Stuart Court. A t the elite level, Coleman Street’s Isaac Pennington took pride of place as the most important revolutionary among all the City’s godly militants. Pennington, whom Maurice Abbot rated as one of the wealthiest men in the ward, worked with John Pym and Henry Vane to persuade sectors of the monied merchant interest in London to join the opposition against the king. While most members of England’s elite mercantile establishment, the Company of Merchant Adventurers, retained their loyalty to the crown, Pennington and his colleagues successfully courted important traders who did most of their business in the colonies or, by interloping, in regions the world over reserved for merchant monopolies. As the historian Robert Brenner has recorded in exhaustive detail, these efforts of Pennington, Vane, and Pym reveal how the City’s political network of revolutionaries drew upon an older network that had brought the saints together through colonization efforts across the Atlantic. With their attention now focused on England itself, Isaac Pennington’s point man on the street, Coleman Streeter Daniel Lacy, brought pressure to bear on City government through mass

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petitioning campaigns. Such efforts helped to inform ordinary Londoners about high political affairs as it integrated them as active participants in what would become the nation’s most momentous political confrontation. Petitioning campaigns in turn depended upon an infrastructure of political mobilization that took in London’s networks of trading and livery companies, its puritan churches and conventicles, and its licensed and unlicensed printing presses. Beyond the ranks of propertied freemen, working men and women organized their own petitions and submitted them in the name of their class, gender, and occupational background, with demands for reformation tendered by self-styled “seamen,” “apprentices,” “porters,” “poor women,” and “poor laboring men.” These appeals sometimes integrated specific economic grievances into general calls for reform. Members of different groupings within the commonality, such as seamen and apprentices, also combined their efforts and submitted joint petitions of protest, seizing upon a moment of acute instability to force their way into the political life of the nation.13 In early December 1640, Pennington led thousands of Londoners in a march across the City to Westminster, where they presented Parliament with the “Root and Branch” demands for the reformation of the church and state. Fifteen thousand citizens signed the petition, which pegged the future success of the reformation project on the abolition of episcopacy. The petition identified the bishops as “a main cause” of the Scottish war and “many foul evils, pressures and grievances of a very high nature” that oppressed his majesty’s subjects “in their own consciences, liberties and estates.” One of the most grievous offenses listed in this regard involved the bishops’ suppression of the feoffees of impropriation, the well-funded instrument of militant Protestant evangelism founded by John Davenport in the late 1620s. The petition also called for the abolition of crown monopolies and prerogative courts, two institutions, the latter dominated by bishops, that had constrained the profit-making opportunities of godly merchants and investors in the Atlantic and beyond.14 As the principal impediments to the progress of reformed religion at home and profitable colonial commonwealths abroad, the bishops would have to go. Accordingly, the following March, Archbishop Laud would be forced to exchange his residence in Lambeth Palace for far less comfortable quarters in the Tower of London, accused as a traitor. Now on the defensive, Charles conceded in a historic first that he would “lay down . . . what parts of my revenue that shall be found illegal.” Contrary to his absolutist aspirations, the king deferred to his opponents in

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Parliament by promising to apply his prerogative only within the bounds of the law, most specifically in reference to taxation. Pressing Parliament’s new advantage, Pennington led bills through the Commons that stripped the king of his ability to dissolve Parliament without majority consent while mandating that he call it into session every three years. At the same time, Pennington led the effort to transform the Root and Branch Petition’s demands into statute law. His maneuver drew fire from fellow reformers in the House of Commons such as George Digby, the future earl of Bristol, not so much for the content of the petition, which Digby largely supported, as for the democratic fashion in which Pennington had brought the petition up for consideration in Parliament. Joining a collection of other prominent MPs, Digby assailed the Root and Branch’s legitimacy, dismissing it as the views of “I know not what, 15,000” guttersnipes from the grimy streets of London. Simonds D’Ewes, a reforming MP who kept a diary of the proceedings, recorded that Isaac Pennington “stood up” to respond to Digby, arguing that the Root and Branch Petition had “been warranted by the hands of men of worth and known integrity. And if there were any mean man’s hands to it, yet if they were honest men, there was no reason but their hands should be received. . . . There was no course used to rake up hands, for,” as Pennington continued, “if that course had been taken instead of 15,000 they might have had fifteen times fifteen thousands.” Contingent upon the need to create and deploy an effective popular base, Pennington’s efforts to integrate the commonality into the political life of the nation alarmed many even inside the reformer fold, as it seemed to undo the humanist principle that that those born to serve the body politic from without should never presume to rule within.15 In May 1641, reformist appeals to the populace continued, this time through the efforts of godly parliamentarians to make the literal execution of root and branch justice a public spectacle. The execution of Thomas Wentworth, the earl of Stafford, occurred on Tower Hill before an estimated crowd of 200,000, packed into stadiumlike grandstands built expressly for the occasion. The event appears today as a vivid illustration of how the architects of the “blessed Reformation” effectively orchestrated public spectacles to build their case for constitutional revolution.16 But the process of militant Protestant mass politicization relied on methods more effective than spectacular theatrics. Against the backdrop of Strafford’s execution, Parliament, in a revolutionary departure from past practice and humanist political theory, appealed directly to the people through a covenant oath called “the Protestation,” wherein each subscriber vowed to

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“maintain and defend . . . with my life, power, and estate, the true reformed, Protestant religion . . . his majesty’s royal person, honor, and estate, as also the power and privileges of Parliament, the lawful rights and liberties of the subject, and every person that maketh this Protestation.” In revolutionary fashion, Parliament appealed directly to both the propertied and unpropertied to subscribe to a national covenant, in which “the people” consisted of all the people. The entire population would need to knit together to keep England from complete annihilation at the hands of its antichristian enemies. “The long intermission and unhappy breach of Parliaments” during Charles’s personal reign, the “many illegal taxations” this “occasioned,” and the “divers innovations and superstitions” imposed by the bishops had “introduce[d] the exercise of an arbitrary and tyrannical government” in church and state,” “driven multitudes” into exile around the Atlantic, and “subvert[ed] both the true faith” and the “fundamental laws of England and Ireland.” Even worse, according to persistent rumors of an antipuritan plot in the armed forces, Strafford’s “popish army levied in Ireland” now threatened to deliver the coup de grace to English liberty and religion. By taking the Protestation, any person (including women, and many did subscribe), from any walk of life, could be bound by oath to the political nation to protect the freeborn from their determined foes, who included the Irish, “priests, Jesuits, and other . . . wicked counsels, practices, plots, and conspiracies.” Read out in every parish in the country, the Protestation became a “shibboleth,” a sacred sign of fidelity not only to the commonwealth but to its continuing reformation. As the historian David Cressy has written, “The opening of the Protestation to universal manhood subscription represented a significant opening and remodeling of the political nation. Never before had so many subjects been invited to act as citizens, regardless of rank.” Over the course of the next year, the effective organization of the king’s opposition on the streets and in Parliament, as well as the king’s own intransigence, would transform the Protestation into a revolutionary document.17 The success of the Protestation in galvanizing opposition to the court emboldened England’s leading reformers to press for radical change at home and abroad. In August 1641, godly MPs took aim at the prerogative courts, abolishing Star Chamber and High Commission, thus removing the regime’s most effective instruments of coercive power. With the courts gone, some of the saints they had imprisoned experienced a jubilee, as the jailors of the Wood Street Compter discovered when they were forced to discharge Henry Jessey and four other members of the Southwark church where the

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recently martyred Samuel How had once preached. With the most powerful prerogative courts no longer a worry, the most militant among the parliamentary reformers could lay out their case against the crown with impunity. The result came in the form of the Grand Remonstrance, a painstaking litany of 204 grievances against the Stuart Court. Largely the work of Henry Vane and Nathaniel Fiennes, the remonstrance cataloged the “continual differences and discontents betwixt the King and the people upon questions of prerogative and liberty.” It also addressed the endangered state of English Protestantism, demanding that the king convene the nation’s clergy at Westminster to devise a program for church reform. A classic example of impugning the king’s councilors while leaving the monarch himself free of blame, the Grand Remonstrance demanded that the king purge all “Papists, Arminians, and Libertines” from his court. Vane and Fiennes also dipped deeply into Protestant England’s bottomless well of Catholic conspiracy theory, writing that the king had made a traitorous “accommodation to popery,” the effect of which had “divert[ed] . . . His Majesty’s course of wars from the West Indies . . . the most . . . hopeful way for this kingdom to prevail against the Spaniard.” Fiennes would have pushed especially hard on this point, as his father, Lord Saye and Sele, had been deeply invested in the Providence Island Company.18 For close to two decades, the godly had failed in successive attempts to take the country to war in the West Indies, where many leading saints had sunk large portions of their considerable fortunes. The Grand Remonstrance allowed the saints to lay the blame for Spain’s continued grip on the Americas directly at the feet of mustache-twisting Catholic villains, waiting in the wings of Whitehall to return England to Roman rule. Clearly, the West Indian dimensions of the militant Protestant revival envisioned by Vane, Fiennes, and others had come to occupy an important place in the opposition’s program. Tying the interests of domestic political and religious reform to a militant Protestant foreign policy, the godly party forming around Pym in Parliament saw the foiling of the so-called popish plots in England as a stepping-stone to even grander goals, the first being English empire-building in the Caribbean, where the decline of Spanish power would bolster England’s ability to restore the Reformation’s flagging fortunes on the Continent. Despite these high hopes, the prospect for an English-led Protestant international darkened in October 1641, when Catholics in Ulster and then throughout Ireland staged an anticolonial uprising against Protestant settlers to reclaim their land and liberties as equal subjects of Charles I, king of

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Great Britain and Ireland. As in most frontier colonial wars in the English Atlantic, civilians on both sides of the conflict lost their lives. About four thousand Protestants were killed over the course of the rebellion, which lasted from late 1641 to well into 1642; soldiers died in combat and of disease, while civilians perished as a result of being robbed, stripped, and left to the mercy of the elements after being turned out of their homes by Catholics. Much less frequently, Catholics consumed by a chilling lust for revenge murdered women and children in cold blood. In response, Ireland’s Protestants, with reinforcements from Britain, exacted their revenge on tens of thousands of Catholics, most of them noncombatants, including women and children, who were either murdered or left desperately homeless like thousands of unfortunate Protestants. But the Irish Catholic death toll, which exceeded its Protestant counterpart by tens of thousands, hardly mattered in England. Protestants made effective propaganda out of wildly exaggerated tales from Ireland, where bloodthirsty Catholic natives weltered in the gore of the virtuous Protestant settlers they had murdered in the dark and treacherous boglands of a savage nation. To increase the fear factor, writers linked the rebellion to the court’s opposition to puritan reforms as well as to rumors that it planned to loose an army of Irish blades on the Protestants of Britain. Charles himself made the situation even worse in the wake of the Irish rebellion, recklessly remarking that he hoped “this ill news from Ireland may hinder some of those follies in England.” Many staunch Protestants took this to mean that Charles might welcome an Irish massacre of his godly enemies in England. As the historian Michael Braddick has written, “If the English response to the Covenanters’ invasion of 1640 had disappointed the King, the response to the Irish rising must have come as a blow to the solar plexus.” It would not be long before events proved that violence on the Irish colonial frontier had become a catalyst in the outbreak of the English Revolution.19 By mid-December 1641, mounting political tensions exacerbated by news from Ireland had brought the king and his opponents to the brink of a decisive confrontation. On December 11, Coleman Street’s Isaac Pennington submitted two petitions to Parliament supporting the Root and Branch Bill and the Grand Remonstrance. One of the petitions carried the signatures of thirty thousand apprentices, while fifteen to twenty thousand aldermen, merchants, and “citizens of rank and quality” put their names to another petition that, when unrolled, ran over twenty-four yards in length. On December 15, upon Pennington’s insistence, Parliament took the rare step of publishing and distributing copies of the Grand Remonstrance to the

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people, correctly calculating that popular knowledge of its contents would bring mass pressure to bear on the king in the form of armed and angry crowds. The king hardly helped matters when he removed Henry Vane from his position as treasurer of the navy, a decision that inflamed crowds on the street as well as the saints within the House of Commons, where Vane was “much esteemed.” Writing to Isaac Pennington’s brother John, a captain in the king’s navy, Sir Thomas Wiseman, described how “tumultuous assemblies of the Separatists” had started holding emergency meetings throughout London that were full of “rage.” Seeking to secure the City, the king foolishly appointed Colonel Thomas Lunsford, an ally of the deceased yet still infamous earl of Strafford, as lieutenant of the Tower. This “begat so general discontent that his majesty was pleased to remove him after two or three days.” Charles, however, remained unmoved, and on the same day officially rejected the Grand Remonstrance.20 I n the wake of the king’s decision, the mood on the City’s streets quickly turned ugly. As the courtier John Dillingham recorded, “Rude assemblies and multitudes of the baser sort of people” began collecting out of doors, “threaten[ing] a desperate confusion.” “Little skirmishes” broke out across the city, where, as another contemporary observed, “everyone comes thither with his sword.” The violent portent forced Richard Gurney, Maurice Abbot’s successor as lord mayor, to call out the “trained bands,” or the London militia; Gurney’s order actually posed little threat to the demonstrators, as the militia’s sympathies lay more with the crowd than with the king. With a less than loyal militia serving as crowd control, bishops found themselves “violently menaced, affronted, and assaulted by multitudes of people” in front of Westminster Abbey. While citizens armed with Bibles and halberds prayed in the streets for the king’s change of heart, laborers could be seen raising new fortifications to strengthen the rails surrounding the royal residence. King Charles ordered his guards, most of them recently demobilized officers from the Bishops’ Wars, to shoot to kill if the armed and surly crowds milling about the palace grew too restive. It soon became clear, however, that the popular political pressure building against the king could not be contained by force.21 The dam burst on December 27, when thousands of Londoners poured from their homes and shops and flowed through the City streets and down the River Thames toward Whitehall and Westminster. “Seamen and watermen fitt[ed] up barges” on the East End docks and floated “armed men” down the river, where “betwixt York House and Charing Cross Road” they

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joined “ten thousand” apprentices, soldiers, sailors, and others of “mean or a middle quality” streaming through the streets. A sympathetic witness later described the confluence as consisting of “poor or middling sorts” who “had public spirits or lived a more religious life than the vulgar.” Although made up mostly of men, women also figured, sometimes prominently, in the crowd. The crowd also contained at least one knight and member of Parliament, Sir Richard Wiseman, who, armed with his sword, helped to direct crowd actions in front of Westminster alongside John Lilburne. The members of the multitude came armed, carrying staves, clubs, cudgels, truncheons, halberds, and here and there a sword, pistol, or harquebus. Others simply picked up stones. In the shadows of Westminster Abbey and the Palace of Westminster, Wiseman and Lilburne stood before the throngs, exhorting them to expel the bishops from the House of Lords; thousands followed, crying “No bishops! No bishops!” As the company made its way toward Westminster Hall, a troop of cavaliers taunted and charged this “hydra’s head,” as one supporter of the king called the unruly collection of commoners. Undaunted by the mercenary onslaught, “the citizens fought like enraged lions,” as another witness noted, and managed to break into some of the palace buildings that made up the parliamentary complex. There the fighting grew even more desperate, and it eventually spilled back out into the courtyard. Tragically for the court’s opponents, Sir Richard Wiseman suffered a mortal wound in the action. Over the course of the next two days, civil strife ebbed and flowed through the streets and lanes of Westminster as well as in New Palace Yard and other public spaces in the neighborhood. On December 28, sword-swinging cavaliers rushed pell-mell out of the abbey to revenge themselves on the crowd. In front of Whitehall on December 29, more fighting ensued with gunshots, screams, and the clash and clang of iron and steel mixing with curses and the crowd’s incessant chorus, “Down with the bishops, down with the bishops!” The fighting spread past the palace buildings, into the City, and down the broad thoroughfare of Cheapside. When the lord mayor appeared there before a surly crowd, a woman tore from his neck the chain that bore the gilded device of his civil office. Determined mobs of men and women freed prisoners taken “for conscience’ sake” from Newgate and the Wood Street Compter. Back near the royal palace at Whitehall, the people “stood so thick” on the ground, as one witness remembered, that coaches could hardly pass among them. “And though” December 28 “were a dark night,” the same witness reflected that “their innumerable links” or torches “made it as light as day.” Only a pounding winter storm of sleet and snow followed

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by rain and a flash flood could finally wash the army of insurgents away from the political high ground that they had set out to occupy.22 Early the next month Charles, as one Londoner put it, “resolved that the King should be a King again” after he received news that John Pym had prepared a bill to arraign Queen Henrietta Maria on the charge of treason, the same charge that the king had levied against Pym. Forced into action, Charles broke out of Whitehall on January 4 with a phalanx of pistol-waving janissaries. They made straight for the House of Commons, then in session. With his armed guard waiting outside, Charles entered Parliament to arrest Pym and four of his most able allies: Denzill Holles, Arthur Haselrigge, John Hampden, and William Strode. The members stood aghast as the royal personage, in a stunning breach of protocol, strode haughtily into the chamber. But the king’s quarry, as he quickly discovered in an unwelcome surprise, were not to be found. “It appears,” the stunned and embarrassed Charles muttered to the indignant members, “that the birds have flown.” As it turned out, the Coleman Street brewer-merchant and MP Isaac Pennington had helped hustle the “five members” out of the Houses of Parliament and down to a nearby dock, where a waiting waterman took them for a covert trip up the River Thames.23 As for Charles, his brief step into the world of the bold had started him down the path to disaster. By entering the House of Commons without invitation, the king had shown more than bad form; he had displayed sheer disdain for the tradition that the monarch could enter only at the invitation of House members. The tradition symbolized, as the king surely knew, the monarch’s respect for the rule of law and the civil liberties of the people. Although from Charles’s vantage point he had acted to spare his wife from a trip to the executioner’s block, his opponents now viewed him as the personification of arbitrary government. When Pennington assisted the five members in escaping from Westminster, he made sure to find them a reliable refuge in the City, choosing the trusted confines of the Red Lion Inn, tucked conveniently away within the heart of the puritan underground in Coleman Street Ward. But while the MPs had landed safely, Londoners prepared for a bloodbath, fearing that Charles would order out troops to violently suppress the rising tide of insurgency within the City. Observers wrote of citizens “shutting up all their shops and standing at their doors with swords and halberds,” determined to defend their homes and places of businesses from their own king. But the citizens did not wait to be slaughtered in defense of their lives and liberties; they took the offensive as well. General Phillip Skippon, a godly and much beloved veteran of the Thirty Years’ War who now com-

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manded the London militia, or “trained bands,” ordered his troops into Coleman Street Ward to protect the five parliamentary refugees. The soldiers came wearing copies of the Protestation in their hats. The king came, too, but not for blood; instead, he went to the Guildhall to assure the MPs who had repaired there as a body that he meant them no harm, that he had entered the Commons in search of traitors and not to take the lives of loyal MPs. The king found a less than receptive audience at the Guildhall, but he discovered after his failure there that things on the street were far worse. From their hideout in the Red Lion, the five members could hear the roar of the crowd resounding through the ward as it surged on to confront the royal party outside the Guildhall. There, his majesty came face to face with the London mob, which surrounded the monarch and forced him to acknowledge the people’s liberties under the law with frenzied cries of “Privilege of Parliament! Privilege of Parliament!” As one witness wrote, “the King had the worst day in London . . . that he ever had.” Thousands swarmed around his carriage, their faces contorted with anger and their throats hoarse from screaming. For a moment at least, the king must have thought that he would die then and there at the hands of his own subjects. Although we have no way of knowing exactly what ran through his mind, we do know that the mob physically forced Charles to take political instruction from them when several of their number smashed open the windows of the royal carriage and thrust a copy of the Protestation into the trembling hands inside. Clearly shaken by the London crowd, the king fled London on January 10. Seven years would pass before his next visit to the capital, which would prove to be his last.24 As the events of late 1641 and early 1642 illustrate, Coleman Street Ward made the transition from a center for godly politicking to a hotbed of popular revolutionary politics. The transition solidified soon after the king’s flight from London, as evidenced by the funeral of Sir Richard Wiseman, who had died from the wounds he had sustained in the fighting around Westminster. On January 19, Wiseman’s funeral entourage, consisting of “above 200 apprentices with swords and black ribbons . . . and 400 citizens, all in mourning, with each man his sword,” traveled from King Street in Westminster through the City, into the ward, and up into Coleman Street itself, finally halting at St. Stephen’s. There Wiseman’s comrades laid him to rest. To seize the political momentum created by such a well-orchestrated public commemoration of patriotic sacrifice, the future Leveller William Larner printed a broadsheet testifying to Wiseman’s bravery and godly valor; Larner claimed that thousands of apprentices had subscribed for their own

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copy. Another author, most likely Wiseman’s brother, Sir William, penned an ode to the fallen hero, who, as the tract held, died fighting against “our Commonwealth’s incestive enemies.” “More cautious statesmen of our Republic,” as the mourning brother lamented, “exempted” themselves “from danger.” Sir Richard’s “true love for his King, Religion, and Country,” however, had led him to “sacrifice his “last blood” to the “fatal blow.” Later that January, the Coleman Street colonialist and MP Thomas Wroth presented Parliament with a petition in support of the Root and Branch bill. Wroth also delivered an address condemning the king’s “breach of the privileges of Parliament . . . in an unparalleled manner by the wicked counsels and devices of a malignant party (as we conceive) of popish lords bishops and others.” Inspired perhaps by Wiseman’s recent example, Wroth proclaimed that “we are ready to seal with our purest blood . . . that which is the life of our liberty, the rights and privilege of parliament.” Antichrist still lurked in the shadows, Wroth warned, but the saints could grow increasingly confident that the “great work toward the blessed reformation” that they had commenced would lead to “the great salvation” of England.25 At the end of January, a crowd of the Coleman Street commonality pressed on with the work of the “blessed reformation.” In a broadside that appeared under the title The Humble Petition of Many Thousand Poor People in and About the City of London, once again printed by William Larner, the petitioners remonstrated against the “malignant party” led by “the Bishops and popish Lords” who had upended the “peace and tranquility of England” and Ireland, where Catholics were “weltering in blood” from their Protestant victims. The bishops’ incompetence, corruption, and tyrannical innovations on prerogative courts and in royal councils had also resulted in a “great decay and stop of trade,” leaving the people “impoverished” and without “bread to sustain themselves.” The Humble Petition went on to warn that the commoners would not “suffer themselves and their families to perish through hunger and misery . . . they cannot leave any means unassayed for their relief.” Leaving the threat of popular violence hanging in the air, the document went on to argue for political change much more radical than that endorsed in the Houses of Parliament. Instead of continuing the traditional arrangement of government by king, Lords, and Commons, the petitioners called for a revolutionary transformation of England’s ancient constitution, recommending that Lords and Commons “sit and vote as one entire body, which we hope will remove from us our distracted seats.” Such a measure would effectively abolish the House of Lords, and with it perhaps the important prerogative power vested in the Parliament, the

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negative voice or veto that the Lords could constitutionally exercise against legislation coming out of the Commons. Unfortunately, no lengthy explanation justifying such a starkly democratic solution, published in 1642 by a future Leveller, followed. Still the point alone deserves discussion now, as it represents one of the most radically republican positions yet taken in the early days of the English Revolution: a self-consciously working-class faction within the revolutionary coalition called for the abolition of one of the ancient constitution’s most vital prerogative institutions. The copies of The Humble Petition that rolled off William Larner’s press and were sold, scattered, or otherwise distributed around London called for the poor to assemble in Coleman Street Ward, in Moorfields, and “from thence to go to the House of Parliament” to demand the abolition of Lords in the name of the commonality.26 The House of Commons reacted immediately to contain this radical and possibly violent threat from below; the MPs chose one of the “five members,” Denzill Holles, to deliver the petition to the House of Lords. Describing the point-blank desperation of the petitioners, Holles implored their lordships to begin “considering the necessity (or poverty) of the multitude . . . [their] fears will not move till we see a change.” The next day, February 1, true to Holles’s words, a large crowd of women surrounded the Houses of Parliament crying out for bread; they carried with them another petition, signed by fifteen thousand “poor laboring men . . . , porters, and the lowest members of the city,” who repeated the threat that “necessity hath no law . . . it is true. We have nothing to lose but our lives.” The factions in both houses of Parliament that had rallied in defense of the king soon collapsed under the weight of such popular pressure, the spectral terror of a violent uprising of the commonality skillfully manipulated by godly militants in the City and at Westminster.27 Seizing the momentum, Henry Vane, again in collaboration with Nathaniel Fiennes, kept up the pressure on the king by advancing the Nineteen Propositions, a parliamentary initiative that pushed the king closer to war by requiring him to forfeit one of his last remaining prerogatives, the right to appoint his own counselors. The ultimatum also reinforced the Militia Ordinance by calling for Charles to relinquish control over the kingdom’s army and navy.28 After receiving a cloudy answer from Charles, Parliament published a reply very likely written by Henry Vane and Henry Parker, the latter being at that time perhaps the most intellectually able and persuasive political theorist of the parliamentary cause. The tract in question, A Political Catechism, deftly reworked the logic of the king’s response to Parliament’s political advantage. Its authors argued that the king had

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inadvertently admitted that he had exercised the prerogative tyrannically, since his reply, unlike his actions, explicitly affirmed Coke’s ancient constitutional formulation that English kings must use their power in coordination with rather than in opposition to Parliament.29 In New England during his 1637 showdown with John Winthrop, Vane had learned that the exercise of magisterial prerogative unbound by the rule of law led to tyranny. As a twenty-two-year-old, under intense pressure during the antinomian purges and the buildup to the Pequot War, the precocious and untested Vane had burst into tears during a meeting with the General Court, frustrated into a pathetic temper tantrum by his more experienced political opponents. Five years later, however, there would be no more tears from Vane, even though he faced a wilier and even more intractable foe in Charles Stuart. Vane’s experience, first in New England, then in a more influential period of work in Old England with Fiennes, Pym, Parker, and Pennington, had seasoned the principled youth into a student of political thought and a deft political operative, who matched carefully conceived and firmly held convictions with a penchant for subterfuge, misdirection, and intrigue. Following his rather dark role in Stafford’s execution, Vane’s skillful comanagement of the Nineteen Propositions a year later brought the king’s increasingly marginalized position into bold relief, further strengthening the parliamentary opposition.30 As Parliament’s constitutional program took shape over the first half of 1642, Vane’s allies among the Coleman Street elite began cementing places for themselves on the Committee of Public Safety, which by that time, in the words of the historian Robert Brenner, had become “the chief instrument of the City revolution.” The London Common Council named Coleman Street Ward’s James Russell and Owen Rowe to the fourteen-member committee, which effectively governed London in response to the unsettled state of affairs that followed the king’s invasion of the Commons. The committee and the council set about creating more popularly accountable forms of City government. They enfranchised the entire body of London’s freemen, which for a time widened the revolutionary base in the City. Rowe and Russell also voted in favor of a successful resolution to strip the veto power that the City aldermen held over Common Council initiatives. Pragmatically intended to shore up a political constituency for the revolutionaries, the move also allowed the deliberative will of propertied people, as voiced by the members of a more democratic assembly, to pass more easily into law.31 T h e crowd actions of the poor and middling sort helped break down the machinery of Stuart government, as did another critical form of political

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labor undertaken by members of the commonality, the operation of illicit printing presses. In 1642 alone, English presses rolled out over four thousand works, compared to just six to seven hundred printed during the previous decade. Even after the first revolutionary crisis had passed in the early 1640s, Parliament could not regulate the massive outpouring of printed work from either licit or illicit presses. To cut its losses, MPs concentrated on shutting down the secret sites of seditious literary production. Avoiding a battle of wits through an orchestrated campaign in print, the government decided to target the revolutionary workers of the printing underground. At its most fundamental and significant level, the print culture created by the revolutionaries revolved around work: thinking, writing, walking, carrying, transporting, lifting, reading, arranging, setting, printing, proofing, packing, delivering, stacking, hiding, and distributing printed texts, either freely or for a price. It should be said that the men and women who undertook this work were not interested merely in reading, writing, and the presentation of religious and political positions; emboldened by their convictions, they put their lives on the line by creating, producing, and distributing radical texts, running risks that ranged from incarceration to torture and execution.32 It’s important to remember that the small producers of revolutionary print politics were not just playing with words; they had committed themselves to secret, dangerous, physically taxing, and psychologically demanding work. In the anxious hours of the covert printing process, the door could be kicked in at any moment and all concerned hauled off to rot in a fetid London jail. Acquiring an illegal press, moving it from one clandestine location to another, collecting funds to cover costs, setting the type, printing and binding the pages, and distributing the finished product involved complicated, skilled, stressful, and often intense mental and physical work. From the beginning when an author took quill in hand to the end when people came into possession of the printed words, every phase of the underground printing process constituted an act of seditious political labor indispensable to the success of the revolutionaries’ challenge to the “malignant party,” the insulting name they gave to the king’s supporters. The political labor that made the radical press run also allowed insurgents the opportunity to expound upon their principles for a public that reached far beyond their immediate sphere of action and out into the Atlantic world itself.33 At some point in 1640 or perhaps even a little earlier, puritan critics of the court smuggled a printing press out of the Netherlands and into London. The smugglers most likely received assistance from John Canne, a for-

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im age 3 . As portrayed in this 1642 engraving, the print culture of the English Revolution could flourish only through hard physical work. In the underground Coleman Street Ward press, political labor of this sort was illegal and conducted in secret. The men and women who operated the press and distributed the literature it produced faced imprisonment, torture, and possible death due to the horrid conditions of early modern English prisons, where many political prisoners did indeed die. Taken from Abraham Bosse’s De la maniere de ga l’eau forte et au burin (Paris, 1745). Photo appears courtesy of The Newberry Library (Case Wing Z416 .109).

mer Coleman Street conventicler who ran a godly publishing house in exile in Amsterdam. Despite the mystery of how it arrived in London, we can be certain that the unlicensed press quickly ended up in Coleman Street Ward, more particularly in nearby Moorfields, where Samuel How had resided. As one informer reported that summer to the House of Lords, “thirty in the city have joined together to maintain a private press to print seditious and libelous works.” We know about this covert operation due to the impressive research of the historian David Como, whose work, as noted in the first chapter, has revealed so much about London radicalism during the 1630s and early 1640s.34

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As Como found in the records of another House of Lords hearing from March 1641, one “John Welles of Moore Fields” confessed to illegally “publishing divers books,” including the absolutely seditious England’s Complaint to Jesus Christ against the Bishops Cannons, which we will examine shortly. It’s also plausible, given the covert nature of her task, that Katherine Hadley utilized the underground press in Moorfields to publish the manuscripts she had smuggled out of the Fleet Prison for John Lilburne. The fact that Hadley chose to distribute the printed copies near the “wrestling grounds” in Moorfields, the very neighborhood where the press operated, adds more circumstantial evidence in support of this suggestion. Like many others from the ward, John Welles may have joined the Levellers, as this name shows up on lists from the late 1640s of agitators and conspirators associated with the movement. Although questions remain concerning Welles’s possible Leveller associations, there can be no doubt about the political views later taken by the director of the Coleman Street underground press, Richard Overton. Along with two other Coleman Street residents, John Lilburne and William Walwyn, Overton would go on to lead the Leveller movement in the latter half of the decade.35 Following a popular English literary tradition stretching back to the sixteenth-century work of John Foxe, Overton used the secret press to create a cast of revolutionary martyrs for a mass audience, including those who couldn’t read but could hear the content of the tracts read out or discussed at work, in taverns, on the street, or in church. The pantheon of suffering saints established by Overton ran the entire range of the godly spectrum, from the Magisterial Reformation doyen William Prynne to the cobbler Samuel How, Prynne’s Radical Reformation counterpart. While the other “martyrs” such as Prynne were already famous in their own right, Overton’s press imprinted How, albeit posthumously, on the public consciousness. While How’s teaching had spread through godly networks by word of mouth and most probably through the circulation of handwritten notes and manuscripts, the impact of his gospel multiplied when it reached the printed page. By publishing such a controversial sermon as The Sufficiency of the Spirit’s Teaching soon after the cobbler’s death in 1640, Overton acknowledged How’s growing import as well as his own respect for the tub preacher’s ideas. The future Leveller reprinted the tract in 1644, appending his own playful if not poetic tribute to the conventicle leader, an act revealing Overton’s affection for How as well as his admiration for the former soldier and sailor’s unvarnished yet penetrating intellect. By spreading the mechanic preacher’s message through the medium of print, Overton en-

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dowed How with a perpetual pulpit atop an iconic tub. There the martyr could continue holding forth on the social gospel from beyond the grave to inspire confidence in the godly commonality, “the tinkers, the peddlers, the chimney sweepers and cobblers,” as they turned to political revolution to advance the Radical Reformation. 36 The sermon How preached in the Nag’s Head, like the one that John Wheelwright had delivered in Boston, led to both antinomian politicization and a political conflagration. But print magnified the explosive potential of How’s controversial sermon, which elicited a fevered reaction from the king’s party, revealing the deep ideological discord that made the 1640–42 revolution possible. Once emergent royalists understood how well How’s words resonated with the godly in the revolutionary crowd, they launched rabid counterattacks that amounted to a kind of literary terrorism. Their printed broadsides strove to blast readers awake to the danger in their midst, that the great chain of being holding English society together would break under the weight of the subversive gospel preached by antinomians such as How, who quickly became an antinomian archetype. The future scenarios they portrayed approached the catastrophic, especially to those who saw the great chain as the basis for the peace, order, and prosperity of the propertied body politic. Freed by dark angels like the Cobbler from the bonds of obedience ordained by providence, the mean and obscure would plunge England into anarchy, subjecting their social betters to the servitude they had formerly suffered. In this world turned upside down, a perverse tyranny would reign, where bondsmen made masterless would enslave their former masters. Although several royalist writers turned their attention to How, nobody sustained the attack against the old soldier and sailor more relentlessly than the “water poet” John Taylor, a bon vivant, traveler, and well-placed member of the Waterman’s Company. Although his lack of facility with the Latin classics had forced him to leave grammar school, Taylor persisted in defending what he could not understand, and promoted the learned elite’s use of Latin and the intellectual authoritarianism it encouraged. He believed that if left unchecked, the barbaric claims made on these intellectual privileges by the virtual savages of his own society would collapse the social order that God had bestowed upon his people. As Taylor recognized, images as well as words were vital to the persuasive power of his argument. In a 1640 pamphlet, Taylor included a woodcut of How preaching out of a barrel-pulpit alongside a woman in a tavern marked by a sign picturing a horse’s head. Taylor recognized that locating How in the Nag’s Head would

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associate his target with Coleman Street Ward, the London neighborhood most notorious for puritan militancy, a tactic that could only strengthen his case against the Cobbler and the godly in general. Taylor mocked the lay preachers’ disdain for “human learning” in matters of the spirit in a scorching piece of classical satire where he characterized How as “John of Heyden the late cobbler of Hounsditch,” a not so subtle recasting of the late lay preacher as the much-maligned German antinomian rebel John of Leyden. Enlisting Coleman Street Ward to provide the appropriate heretical backdrop, Taylor had How’s alter ego conduct a “discourse” with much more learned companions, one of them a bishop, on a stroll through the park in Moorfields, “the most necessary, pleasant, and the sweetest walks that can be by the side of any city in Europe.” When asked why the park was called Moorfields, the Cobbler responded that “more learned and godly preaching by our brethren is here exercised than in the city or whole land beside,” a ridiculous answer meant to paint the saints as self-absorbed idiots. The Cobbler then declares that he does not like the trees in the park because they appear in the shape of bishops, another exchange Taylor devised to ridicule the saints as philistines.37 In a 1641 pamphlet titled A Swarm of Sectaries, Taylor attacked How for preaching “gainst schools, and learning . . . tongues, science, logic, [and] rhetoric . . . at the Nags Head near to Coleman Street,” where a “pure crew of brethren there did meet.” To make the point perfectly clear, Taylor used the earlier engraving for the cover. Describing How’s congregation, Taylor wrote that “these vermin swarm like caterpillars and hold conventicles in barns and cellars, some preach (or prate) in woods fields and stables, in hollow trees, in tubs, on tops of tables.” Taylor portrayed How at once as ludicrous and threatening, an improbable Trojan horse of heresy and sedition from whose belly poured forth foaming squadrons of proletarian lunatics who scoured the City and countryside in search of weak-willed and gullible recruits. Playing on class resentment, these spiritists would seduce their prey and enlist them in a crusading insurrection against Savior, sovereign, and social superiors. Such sectarian subversion, as Taylor wrote, would “turn England this very day . . . the clean contrary way. . . . When men more brutish than the horse or mule, who know not how to obey, presume to rule, thus church and commonwealth and men are out of frame and out of square.”38 Taylor graphically illuminated the future state of the world should mechanic preachers like Samuel How succeed in turning it upside down. In a 1642 tract he called Mad Fashions, the woodcut on the cover page displayed

im age 4 . Samuel How’s famous sermon at the Nag’s Head tavern in Coleman Street Ward, depicted here in a woodcut gracing the title page of John Taylor’s A Swarm of Sectaries and Schismatics (London, 1641), enraged both Royalist and Presbyterian heresiographers. In their hands, How became a symbol of the anarchy that antinomianism would unleash upon England. In contrast, the underground printer and Leveller leader Richard Overton fashioned How as an iconic inspiration of the Radical Reformation. Photo appears courtesy of the Houghton Library, Harvard University (EC T2152 641s).

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a church with its floor to the sky and its steeple impaled in the ground. Other symbols of inversion included a whip-wielding horse driving a cart hauled by a man, indicating that the “meaner sort” was striving to enslave their social betters as beasts of burden, the part the commonality had once played in early modern society. Beyond his apocalyptic portraits of doom, the author proposed solutions to keep the great chain of being intact. Given the links between English separatist churches in London and Amsterdam, Taylor reasonably suspected that Radical Reformation influences from the Continent had made inroads among “barbers, mealmen, brewers, and bakers, religious sow gelders and button makers, coopers and cobblers, tinkers and peddlers, weavers and chimney sweepers.” These foreign influences, Taylor wrote, must be stopped from leading the body of Christ and the body politic in England astray. The simplest solution for Taylor lay in standing the problem on its head; domestic threats from foreign sources must be made foreign again through a banishment of “separatists and schismatics” to the colonies. Once in the Americas, Taylor exclaimed, “let them the moors and barbarous Indians teach, and to man-eating cannibals go preach.” Following a strain of English humanism that had prevailed in the process of colonization, Taylor recommended banishment beyond the seas for How, a plebeian seditionist and member of the “mutinous poor.” Like others of his class who stood aghast at the unruly character of the commonality, Taylor believed that the colonies should serve as a safety valve to lessen the insurrectionary pressure in Old England. Although Taylor’s verse hardly provided the inspiration, his hero’s son, Charles II, would adopt just such a solution for Protestant dissenters after the Restoration.39 Unlikely saints from Coleman Street Ward arose to defend How’s legacy against Taylor’s onslaughts. Although he had opposed How on doctrinal grounds during the 1638 showdown with John Goodwin, Isaac Pennington viewed the water poet rather than the Cobbler as the seditionist in 1642. In November of that year, Pennington hauled the prolific Taylor before the bar of the House of Common on charges of sedition. Taylor luckily avoided conviction when no witnesses materialized. In contrast, a more popular tribunal, the Coleman Street crowd, proved more than eager to bear witness to Taylor’s sedition against the sovereignty of King Jesus. When word spread around the ward that Taylor had repaired to the Three Tuns tavern near the Guildhall, a crowd quickly organized into a determined company bent on taking his life. They stormed the Three Tuns, but Taylor slipped through their grasp, rushing through the shop of a startled tobacconist and down an alley to live another day.40 It would be difficult to imagine that the publica-

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tion of How’s sermon in the covert press and its subsequent popularity was disconnected from either Penningon’s initiative against Taylor or the Coleman Street crowd’s violent attack against the water poet. In sum, Overton had used print to transform the cobbler into “the Cobbler” in the crucial 1640–42 period, fashioning a once obscure member of the antinomian underground into an inspiring and preeminent symbol of the Revolution. Richard Overton, however, used the underground Coleman Street press to do much more than burnish How’s radical image; indeed, his illegal printing operation produced some of the earliest formulations of English revolutionary thought. England’s Complaint to Jesus Christ Against the Bishop’s Canons, which Overton published in 1640, offers a compelling case study. Written in direct protest against the Laudian canons of April 1640, the pamphlet answered a perennial question of early modern political thought, whether or not the people possessed the right to forcefully resist monarchs who governed in violation of the rule of law. Even when their sovereigns trampled on their liberties, many English and most continental political philosophers agreed that subjects should either abide the abuse or silently suffer imprisonment as the consequence of passive resistance to unjust laws. In no way should dissent from the exercise of monarchical power occasion questions about the sovereignty of the monarch’s traditional prerogatives. But when pressed, even most royalists would admit that the king’s power derived from an ancient constitutional covenant, via the coronation oath, that bound English monarchs to rule according to laws of the land established by Edward the Confessor and supplemented by subsequent statute law and common law precedents. The anonymous author of England’s Complaint was thus merely echoing an English constitutional truism when he declared that “the ancient Laws and government of the Realm” forbid kings to rule, as Charles had for eleven years, “by an independent or unlimited will of the prince.”41 Employing a well-worn trope, England’s Complaint blamed England’s troubles on the king’s “evil councilors” rather than the king himself. In a characteristically astute observation, the historian John Morrill notes that even up until 1642, the bulk of the king’s most strident opponents refused to cast him as a tyrant, preferring to lessen the seditious character of their arguments by placing the blame on the cunning of malignant advisers. In this way, they could condemn the dynasty without desacralizing the sovereign’s royal person or, more important, the institution of monarchy itself. The author reminded the king’s councilors that they were but “members of the commonwealth and live under the law thereof,” law that forbade

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them to place the people under the “burden of human inventions” such as an unfettered royal prerogative administered through the king’s courts. But while the tyranny of Charles’s personal rule had, according to the author of England’s Complaint, originated from his councilors, the king had acted to “maintain a faction about him . . . to oppress his whole kingdom.” In this way, the author presented the king himself as having actively contributed to the forfeiture of the people’s “laws and liberties and . . . [their] true religion,” abusing his prerogative power by promoting antichristian, self-interested bishops and courtiers who polluted the church and ancient constitution with the corruption of continental popery and political absolutism. Through the coronation oath and Magna Carta, sovereign political power had been established by the “mutual consent and covenant between the Prince and the People.” In violation of this venerated covenant, the very wellspring of liberty from which the English drew their “free born” inheritance, Charles had attempted to transform England in the image of “the Turk,” whose society of slaves and servile subjects was lorded over by a despotic government. As the author wrote of the king and his people, “He will not rule them by the good laws of the kingdom, but seeks to make all his subjects slaves, by bringing their souls, bodies, and estates under a miserable bondage.”42 England’s Complaint was not, in constitutional terms, a revolutionary document. The author called for the restoration of the ancient constitution to rein in the royal prerogative, an argument that cast the court as self-interested, innovative, and dangerously indifferent to the rule of law. While the author’s constitutional solution drew from the political mainstream, the question remained precisely how the people should go about restoring the nation’s laws and covenants to recover their liberty. The revolutionary dimension of the argument lay here, in political process and not in constitutional proscription. As the author asked in an emotional appeal to the people: [Is] it not now high time for the whole state either to labour to heal the breach or if necessity (when there is no other remedy) to stand up as one man to defend themselves and their country, until the faction shall be utterly cashiered and so the King reform himself, and renew the Covenant and Conditions of the Kingdom to the good and just satisfaction of the people[?]

To “renew the Covenant” here meant making the king honor his ancient constitutional obligations to govern according to the rule of law, a task that after eleven years of personal rule now required the “whole state”—in

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other words, the ranks of the people from which the government derived its sovereignty—“to stand up as one man,” with or without Parliament, to “labour” together to rescue English liberty from despotic tyranny. Such an appeal ran squarely against the humanist conventions of early modern resistance theory, which, drawing from Romans 13:1, commanded the people’s obedience to duly constituted authority. Popular revolt was construed as satanic as well as seditious, for it represented a perverse usurpation of divinely ordered sovereign power. Such thinking found no place in England’s Complaint. In contrast, on the issue of resistance, rather than drawing on the commonwealth principles of English humanism, the author(s) seems to have been moved by the political labor of the crowd, itself the product of a history of ideas. The author(s), unlike many intellectual historians of our own time, recognized that political ideas are formed and expressed outside the exclusive arena of high politics and in contexts that range beyond the mere literary. In the crucial 1640–42 period, revolutionary political theory could therefore follow as well as inspire popular political practice.43 By urging “the whole state” to rise up during a time when tens of thousands of poor, mean, and obscure commoners had organized mutinies in the military and mass protests, riots, and running battles in the streets, the author of England’s Complaint hardly meant to exclude the commonality from his notion of the body politic. Parliament, which represented “the whole body of the people,” would be pushed into motion through the direct action of the whole body of the people, or it would be left behind as the people combined to “stand up as one man” to defend the ancient constitution. This idea, of a socially new-modeled body politic, inclusive of the commonality, moving of its own accord to restore the nation’s laws and liberties with or without the cooperation of Parliament, contradicted the entire humanist notion of a commonwealth. Following Thomas Smith’s famous De Republica Anglorum, English humanism rendered the commonwealth’s lowest, unpropertied orders rightless “slaves” and “drones.” But to the chagrin of many reforming MPs and those drifting into what would become the king’s party, Pym, Pennington, Vane, and others of their faction acted in line with the argument presented in England’s Complaint by engaging the entire populace, the Protestation being a prime example, in the politics of the commonwealth. But the commonality had no need of being called into political consciousness and action; they had been “up and doing,” to borrow a phrase from Oliver Cromwell, for quite a long time, although they had had little opportunity before the Revolution to purvey their ideas to wider audiences through print.

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G i v e n the links between Coleman Street’s conventicle and publishing undergrounds and the import of both in the politics of the early Revolutionary years, it’s perhaps surprising that it was Samuel How’s inquisitor, the Reverend John Goodwin, who produced the most radical political pamphlet of the era. In the 1640–42 period, while presiding over London’s largest puritan congregation, Goodwin became one of Parliament’s most important political theorists and propagandists. For close to a decade before the outbreak of the Revolution, Goodwin split his time between antagonizing antinomians and uniting with them against the perceived onset of “popery” in the English state. During the dark days of the Laudian ascendancy, Goodwin preached a series of “fast day” sermons on Coleman Street celebrating England’s deliverance from the Catholic archvillain Guy Fawkes, whose Gunpowder Plot had come close to destroying the guardians of English Protestant liberty as they convened at Westminster for the opening of the 1605 Parliament. “Drinking . . . down” Fawkes’s thirty-six barrels of powder, proclaimed the minister in a memorable metaphor, would “breed good blood, spirit, and courage” in the saints as they engaged with the forces of Antichrist in the Privy Council and prerogative courts. Besides imbibing the saints with such explosive literary spirits, Goodwin’s November 5 sermons also warned the king that providentially ordained retribution awaited even “the greatest . . . kings and princes” who had persecuted God’s people. In 1640, within the more hopeful context of the calling of the Long Parliament, Goodwin published his series of fast day sermons in a collection titled The Saints’ Interest. Henry Overton, a member of Goodwin’s church, sold this book and many others that Goodwin would write during the Revolution in his shop on Pope’s Head Alley near the Royal Exchange.44 In October 1642, the parliamentary army under the command of the earl of Essex suffered a defeat at the Battle of Edgehill, leaving London vulnerable to a royalist assault. The loss at Edgehill, coupled with the commonality’s rising political participation and expectations, moved Denzill Holles, one of the “five members,” to seek a settlement with the king, albeit one that would restore him to power without resolving the issues that had set the English to killing each other. In November 1642, with the parliamentary coalition beginning to fragment, the London trained bands with a regiment commanded by Owen Rowe began digging in just west of the City on Turnham Green in anticipation of a royalist attack. Rising to the occasion, Goodwin delivered a defiant sermon to inspire the godly that he later published under the title The Butcher’s Blessing. Dedicating the tract to Isaac Pennington, London’s new lord mayor, Goodwin took on the role of

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a podium-pounding patriot-prophet, spreading the good news of a revolutionary gospel to England’s true blue freeborn Protestants. Exhorting the rich, poor, eminent, and weak to defend the capital against the “Romish Cavaliers” camped outside the city’s walls, Goodwin appealed, in language similar to that used by the author of England’s Complaint, to the publicspiritedness of Londoners of all ranks. His charged words were meant “to engage you all as one man to rise up at once in your might” against the “whirlwind of cruelty and blood” that the mercenary force of freebooting cavaliers would surely inflict upon the people. Readers of The Butcher’s Blessing would have known that Mayor Pennington and his wife Mary were laboring just then alongside people of all classes to build the City’s defensive fortifications, personifying the public-spirited patriotism extolled by Goodwin. Although still opposed to “mechanick” preachers, Goodwin, like Overton, recognized the value, indeed the necessity, of healing old wounds in the godly community early on in the Revolution. In the face of the enemy, old opponents must now become steadfast allies.45 Goodwin elaborated on this theme in a another tract that he published with Henry Overton in the fall of 1642 titled Anti-Cavalierism, which declared, at least to Goodwin’s satisfaction, the principles for which the godly took up arms against the king. Anti-Cavalierism became Goodwin’s most famous piece of political writing. It contained a systematic, passionate history of Charles’s supposed tyranny, the English nation’s subsequent descent into political slavery, and the futility of seeking any accommodation with a king bent on fettering his people in the bonds of absolutism and crypto-Catholicism. Settling with the king, Goodwin warned, would result in the political ascendancy of the Cavaliers—the “scum . . . dross and garbage of the land,” the “philistines . . . Jesuits . . . papists, and atheists,” who in this description formed the heart and soul of the king’s army. This “most accursed confederacy,” according to Goodwin’s gross caricature, had engaged to commit wanton murder, rape, and plunder, and was now “hammering England, to make an Ireland of it.” The cavaliers, in the cleric’s view, fought for the reasons that motivated all soldiers of fortune to serve tyrants: the gold, glory, and blood lust that made forfeit the lives, liberties, and estates of the innocent. The godly, in contrast, fought not for the king’s gold but for the liberty of conscience to overturn absolutism and Antichrist, to redeem the nation from its slavery and speed the progress of the Protestant Reformation. Unsurprisingly, Goodwin’s propagandistic portrait of the king’s army distorted it beyond all recognition. The soldiers who fought for the king in the civil wars, unlike the mercenaries who protected him at Whitehall in

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December 1641, consisted mostly of impressed men from the ranks of the poor supplemented by smaller numbers of conscientious volunteers; the ranks of the infantry serving Parliament broke down in much the same fashion. But Goodwin wanted to portray Parliament’s cause as one that unified all classes into the “whole body of the nation.” “Give me leave in that which remains,” he exclaimed, “to excite and stir you up, from the greatest to the least, both young and old, rich and poor, men and women, to quit yourselves like men.” Goodwin defined the godly war effort, however speciously, as a masculine collective enterprise of faithful English Protestants of both sexes and all generations and classes. But within the apocalyptic context through which the saints understood their own moment, and as would become common in the radical political literature of the Revolution, Goodwin held out a place of extraordinary importance for the mean and poor in the war to emancipate England from “the iron yoke” of political slavery. With “the downfall of antichrist drawing near,” it was “evident” to Goodwin that God desired “the commonality of Christians, I mean Christians of ordinary rank and quality,” to become “the most active” in dethroning Antichrist and “executing the judgments of God upon the Whore.”46 Here, and in contrast to English humanist concepts of political agency, Goodwin clearly vested the commonality with the divinely ordained agency to set out upon England’s reformation work, now to be undertaken through the labor of war. By exhorting commoners of all descriptions to see themselves as the armed embodiment of the body politic and by defining their cause against the alleged mercenary principles of their foes, Goodwin articulated in 1642 two of the central political principles that would frame the soldierconstitution of 1647, the Agreement of the People.47 Departing radically from the ancient constitutionalism of his peers, Goodwin did not see England’s political slavery as arising merely from the king’s abuse of his prerogative power; instead, Goodwin found that England’s lost liberty owed to the very existence of the royal prerogative. In other words, he located the cause of England’s bondage within the ancient constitution itself, a truly revolutionary breakthrough. While encouraging the Long Parliament to continue its reformation work until “the throne and Kingdom of Jesus Christ be lifted up on high,” he contrasted the throne of King Jesus with that of earthly monarchs, writing that obedience to kings was “never intended by God to be universal” since “kingly government is no ordinance of god.” Only God’s laws, revealed by Christ, were universal, particularly in terms of how they bound people to obedience. From this vantage point, the royal prerogative, embedded in the ancient constitution

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as a rightful power of the monarch, appeared absolutely antichristian, as it usurped the royal sovereignty of King Jesus. Until freed from such ungodly discretionary power, the people would continue in “miserable slavery and bondage” under those “who make themselves Lords over you.” Goodwin believed that freedom rested upon persons’ legal independence, which protected them from being made subject to the will of another. If one did not exist free from such subjection, one essentially lived as a slave, even if enjoying a shadow of liberty at the discretion of one’s political masters. Henry Parker, celebrated by intellectual historians as one of the grand theorists and polemicists of Parliament’s cause, did not have this stark contrast in mind when he declared in his Case of Shipmoney that loans forced by the crown without parliamentary consent “enslaved” the nation, being “incompatible with popular liberty.” According to Parker’s ancient constitutional logic, the people remained free if the king exercised his prerogative in a fashion compatible with popular liberty. In contrast to Parker, Goodwin found that since the king might not deploy his power in this salutary fashion, the English nation remained suspended in a state of political slavery to a regime whose sovereignty stood on an arbitrary and therefore illegitimate foundation.48 Already well known as a puritan divine, Goodwin gained even greater notoriety as the author of Anti-Cavalierism. Taking note of the book’s contemporary fame, the late Christopher Hill called it “the most effective work of Parliamentarian political propaganda” in the early revolutionary period. The royalist Henry Hammond felt compelled to respond to Anti-Cavalierism with his own pamphlet, since “many have been satisfied as to the lawfulness” of its argument, a revealing comment indicating that republican thinking was already proliferating through the ranks of Parliament’s supporters by the second year of the Revolution. Indeed, the first edition of Goodwin’s pamphlet sold out, necessitating two more editions in 1643; neither Hammond nor any other royalist who attempted to rebut Goodwin achieved this kind of demonstrable influence. The historian Quentin Skinner’s conclusion, that Anti-Cavalierism represented the earliest and clearest equation of prerogative power with political slavery, helps explain why the book exercised such influence over contemporaries on both sides of the political divide. Goodwin clarified the ancient constitutional confusion over Parliament’s position by dispensing with it, arguing for what in essence amounted to a kingless government, since stripping a king of his prerogative, as Goodwin’s conclusion seemed to demand, effectively “unkinged him,” leaving him a sovereign in name only and the people, through their representatives,

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in sole trust of sovereign political power in the commonwealth. Goodwin’s achievement in Anti-Cavalierism was far from insignificant in the history of English political writing, for he had produced the foundational work of seventeenth-century constitutional republicanism, a signal contribution to the political discourse of an era when the English at home and in the colonies would begin questioning whether prerogative forms of government led a free commonwealth into political slavery.49 T h e godly elite of Coleman Street, the revolutionary crowd that mobilized there, and the illicit press that radicals operated in the ward played instrumental parts in the outbreak of the English Revolution. Isaac Pennington became the most important revolutionary leader in City politics. The alliance he formed with the earl of Warwick, John Pym, and Henry Vane wed the fortunes of the ward’s leading saints to the most militant faction among the king’s many opponents in the Long Parliament. Pennington’s leadership in the petitioning campaigns of 1640–42, in conjunction with the tracts published by his pastor John Goodwin, built a political bridge between the power brokers in Parliament and the mass opposition against the king then organizing in London. Goodwin became one of Parliament’s most effective and popular political propagandists, rallying the godly base with calls to arms with tracts like The Butcher’s Blessing. Moreover, through Anti-Cavalierism, Goodwin was the first to thoroughly define the Revolution in republican terms by pitching the godly cause as a war to emancipate England from the political slavery of the monarchical prerogative. Pennington, with the help of other St. Stephen’s members such as Owen Rowe and James Russell, literally popularized the Revolution by staging the democratic overhaul of London’s government, abolishing the prerogative power of the aldermen and making them accountable to the City’s freemen, the “whole body” of the propertied people as the direct constituency of the Common Council. Additionally, with the help of St. Stephen’s Daniel Lacy, Pennington orchestrated mass petitioning campaigns that enlisted the City commonality as the critical mass in the early days of the Revolution. But as we have seen, beyond the circles of the political elite, Coleman Street radicals such as John Lilburne, Katherine Hadley, and Richard Overton organized crowd actions and an underground press from the bottom up, empowering the people, whether they hailed from within or without the traditionally constituted body politic, as a political force in their own right. By publishing tracts written by revolutionaries advocating both magisterial and radical modes of reformation, Overton used the underground

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press to build a coalition of the godly as it squared off against the king’s party at the outset of the first civil war. Moreover, by fashioning Samuel How as a symbol of radical plebeian wisdom, Overton lionized How, John Goodwin’s bête noir, as a revolutionary prophet. Thus though enemies in life, How and Goodwin would become revolutionary comrades after How’s death. The Cobbler’s popularity as a revolutionary icon also reflected how the commonality proved unwilling to have a program of reform dictated to them by parliamentary elites. They organized themselves for direct action while also heeding calls to act in solidarity with the opposition at Westminster; sometimes their goals intersected, as in the common desire to abolish the prerogative courts, and sometimes they clashed, as shown by Parliament’s reluctance to honor the Coleman Street crowd’s petition to abolish the House of Lords’ negative voice. Nonetheless, the political labor of poor commoners, whether on the streets, in conventicles, or in the underground press, made the English Revolution possible. Finally, at the level of high politics, common colonial interests cemented the alliance that Pennington struck between the godly leadership in the Long Parliament and the Coleman Street Ward revolutionary elite. Together, they looked toward Irish and West Indian wars of conquest as a means to realizing their long-held vision of a godly Atlantic empire. These expansion-minded revolutionaries, along with the godly planters of the English Atlantic, sought to sustain their own emancipation from political slavery by imposing it and variants of economic slavery upon Africans, Native Americans, and Irish Catholics, as well as the poor commoners of England itself. But as we have seen with Samuel How, and as we will see in future chapters with his radical cohort around the Atlantic, there were others just as invested in the reformation work of militant Protestantism who believed true freedom could not be achieved by denying it to others.

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“Monsters,” “Savages,” and “Turbulent Carriages” The Revolutionary Atlantic in Motion

on t h e afternoon of October 14, 1643, Samuel Gorton and the settlers of Shawomet peered into an autumn sky shrouded in the smoke of their burning homes. Fueled by a combination of fear and rage, Gorton and his antinomian followers loaded their muskets and took careful aim at the Bay Colony troops laying siege to their exile settlement. One of the besieged colonists more than likely drew a bead on the strutting, vainglorious figure of Edward Johnson, a captain in the Massachusetts militia. Johnson and his fellow officers, Captain George Cook and Lieutenant Humphrey Atherton, had initiated the standoff at Shawomet through an act of calculated terror. Announcing their violent designs upon their approach, the commanders sent the settlement’s women and children fleeing into the miasmic swamps bordering the tiny outpost, hard by Narragansett Bay. When the Bay Colonists descended upon the village with firebrands, Gorton and the male settlers grabbed their guns and barricaded themselves in a fortified cabin to mount their defense. When the men from Shawomet refused to surrender, Johnson ordered his troops to open fire, pouring over four hundreds rounds into the hastily erected stronghold. Dodging whistling bullets and flying splinters, the settlers inside the cabin decided on their next step. Certainly they were within their rights to fight it out with the Massachusetts militia. Shooting Johnson, as they knew, would eliminate one of the Radical Reformation’s most strident scourges in New England. On the other hand, Johnson’s contingent outnumbered Gorton’s beleaguered force, with the former’s strength supplemented by a band of Indians commanded by Pomham, a maverick Narragansett under-sachem. Besieged by English and 120

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Indian enemies, Gorton’s force concluded that it would be suicide to fight a pitched battle under such circumstances. Outnumbered, ill-equipped, and undersupplied, the settlers stacked their arms and placed themselves in the custody of the Bay Colony troops. Not long afterward, with the same selfimpressed self-righteousness that would infuse his later chronicles of heresy hunting in New England, Captain Johnson ordered the prisoners shackled and force-marched to Boston, where they would stand trial for their lives.1 That November, the Massachusetts court sentenced Gorton to hard labor in chains, voting by a margin of one to spare him from execution. Having barely escaped Boston with his life, Gorton would face another tribunal in London three years later. Before the earl of Warwick’s Committee of Foreign Plantations, the radical recounted his violent ordeal with the Bay Colony militia, a story that formed the crux of his petition for a charter to protect Shawomet against Massachusetts’s aggression. But while in London during the mid-1640s, Gorton did more than petition Parliament. He descended into the antinomian underground, quickly attracting attention as one the city’s most infamous lay preachers. Gorton ministered to the Baptist church of Thomas Lambe in Coleman Street Ward while extolling the sufficiency of the Holy Spirit before congregants who had once listened to Samuel How preach the same gospel six years before.2 Gorton was far from the only colonial radical who returned to London during the English Revolution. Trans-Atlantic remigration, as this chapter discusses, along with the published chronicles of the godly’s trials in the “New World,” ensured that colonial experience in America would make its mark on Revolutionary England.3 And as events would prove, opposing factions within the parliamentary coalition would draw on the puritan ordeal in America to stake out their respective visions of how the Revolution should transform the English commonwealth and revive the fortunes of the Protestant Reformation.4 While most historians have focused on the religious dimensions of this transatlantic exchange, this chapter explores the radical politics that circulating saints practiced in America and introduced to Revolutionary England. The circulation of radical political experience between New and Old England owes to the much-neglected fact that New England experienced its own constitutional revolution against prerogative political institutions roughly at the same time that Old England did, with the former being driven in part by the principles of the Radical Reformation. But while many of New England’s constitutional reformers wanted to do away with the magisterial prerogative in civil affairs, the persistence of antinomian “errors” con-

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vinced many among them that the magistrate should still wield the sword of state in the realm of religion. The political and religious affairs of early New England, however, involved much more than the transfer of what one historian has called the “long argument” about antinomianism across the Atlantic.5 Colonial relations with Native Americans conditioned all facets of life in New England, including the religious and political conflicts that happened within and between colonies. Sparked in part by differences over constitutional reform and the foothold that religious tolerance had already gained in Rhode Island, disputes between the colonies evolved within a complex set of shifting and mutually self-serving colonial-Indian alliances. Eventually, hostile intercolonial relations crossed a violent threshold, creating a volatile political culture where colonies that came into conflict over the nature of reformation found themselves drawn into opposite sides of Native American power struggles. Such intercolonial strife, complicated by the conflicting political agendas of New England’s most powerful Indian peoples, posed a direct challenge to Massachusetts and its aspirations for regional hegemony. Consequently, to secure their own freedom and that of their Narragansett Indian allies, the Rhode Islanders realized they would have to enter the maw of revolutionary politics in Old England. Conversely, the Bay Colony government recognized that it would need to defend the Magisterial Reformation in church and state, what its proponents called the “New England Way,” in London against attacks launched by Rhode Islanders. Following the history of New England’s intercolonial conflicts back to London in the mid-1640s, this chapter explores how Gorton and Williams worked to rectify Rhode Island’s defamation as an American enclave of sedition and savagery. In the process, they helped set the terms of debate over liberty of conscience in England even as they secured Parliament’s protection of their commonwealth as an outpost of the Radical Reformation and a place where relatively peaceable relations between settlers and Indians flourished. O n September 3, 1644, Bermuda’s governor, Roger Wood, wrote to John Winthrop expressing his dismay that England, “our miserable distracted country,” stood in grave danger of becoming a “great vassalage.” If “the King prevailing against Parliament’s armies” found his way back to power, Wood feared that England would once again fall into political and religious bondage to an antichristian power. Bermuda itself, as Winthrop’s correspondent confided, was beset by “distractions and heartburnings . . . by reason of our ministers setting up of an Independent church.” Winthrop

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certainly approved of the move, since the establishment of an “Independent” or “congregational church” on Bermuda, as Wood alternately called the newly gathered congregation, meant that godly islanders had followed the religious lead of Massachusetts in their own colony. Although a godly man himself, Wood, as a Presbyterian, found the initiative far less salutary than did Winthrop, for he favored a church reformed along the lines drawn by such famous English divines as William Prynne and Thomas Edwards. Like the Independents, Presbyterians wanted to do away with the bishops, but instead of the autonomous congregations favored by the Independents/congregationalists, they looked to a church settled on a prescribed set of doctrines governed by a synod of godly ordained ministers. Wood complained that the chief culprits in Bermuda, the clergymen Nathaniel White, William Golding, and Patrick Coupland, would not “refrain” from their “preach[ing] against the errors” of their Presbyterian opponents on the island, namely men like Wood himself. All on the island, Wood wrote, eagerly awaited news from London, where the opposing camps of the godly had assembled at Westminster on July 1, 1643, to debate the course of church reform.6 Publishing their plans in a tract called The Apologetical Narration, Thomas Goodwin and England’s leading Independent clerics acknowledged that New England’s congregational church model had inspired their own; the Presbyterians, under the auspices of Thomas Edwards, responded with Antapologia, or A Full Answer to the Apologetical Narration, which Roger Wood recommended to John Winthrop in his letter from Bermuda. Wood’s suggestion not only displayed the speed in which printed material from Old England’s revolutionary religious debates traveled around the Atlantic but also demonstrated the increasing fear among the more conservative godly in England and the colonies that Independency would unleash heresy in the church and anarchy in the state. Woods used Edwards’s Antapologia to remind Winthrop, still struggling to put the Antinomian Controversy behind him, that the “errors of Anabaptism, Brownism, antinomianism [and] toleration” flourished within the congregational system under the “the pretense of liberty of conscience.” The Presbyterian reformation, as Edwards argued, would keep order rather than breed error. To establish an Atlanticwide front against the introduction of heresy, schism, and social unrest under the guise of reform, Edwards linked New England congregationalism, and particularly the influence of John Cotton, to the Independent platform in the Westminster Assembly. William Prynne, looking farther south in the colonial Atlantic, cited the Independent schism on Bermuda to reduce con-

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gregationalism to religiously inspired sedition and thus an unfit church way for a newly settled commonwealth, whether in Old England or in the colonies. Onslaughts of this sort, as we will see, forced Cotton and his clerical allies in New England such as John Davenport to defend Independency as a church way that, in coordination with the magistracy, tamed the excesses of democracy in both the civil and the spiritual spheres. In the meantime, Bermuda’s William Golding traveled to Old England to enlist the support of Independents there. He found a warm welcome on Coleman Street, where John Goodwin had taken up the American congregationalists’ cause: “The churches of Scotland and New England for doctrine agree in fundamentals [and] differ only in discipline.” Goodwin admonished the Presbyterians for what he saw as their short-sighted vision of reform while at the same time pointing out the common ground that they occupied with other saints in the face of the “common enemy,” the king’s party. Support from an Independent of Goodwin’s stature and the his ultimate political triumph in the Revolution made Golding’s transatlantic mission a successful one, as Independents eventually reestablished their church way in the Somer Islands.7 Independents came under attack in all of the colonial regions of the English Atlantic. In the Chesapeake puritan enclave of Nansemond County, the saints, “bewailing their sad condition for want of the means of salvation,” sent Phillip Bennett on a May 1642 voyage to New England bearing letters “from many well disposed people” containing invitations to godly ministers to remove to Virginia, where they would receive a “call to office.” William Tompson from Braintree and John Knowles from Watertown accepted the call, as did Thomas James, who had left the Bay Colony for Rhode Island before moving on for a short stay in New Haven with John Davenport. Davenport may have leaned on James, for he had received an additional entreaty for ministers from the Virginian William Durand. Once in Virginia, Tompson, unlike most migrants there, found his “health . . . repaired” and his “spirit . . . enlarged” as his new charges in the Chesapeake “were much inflamed with desire after the ordinances.” Virginia governor William Berkeley set himself against initiatives of this sort and tried to shore up Protestant orthodoxy by enforcing conformity with the Book of Common Prayer. Thomas Harrison, who came gradually to the Independent way, turned against Berkeley, his patron, and blamed setbacks in the Powhattan Indian war on Virginia’s Protestant backsliding. Harrison left for London in 1646, while his recruit, Thomas James, returned to New England but, seemingly incapable of remaining in one place for very long, soon followed Harrison back to Old England. In Barbados, the former governor of Ber-

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muda and Providence Island, Philip Bell, had come to power in 1639. Three years later, Bell appealed to Massachusetts to send over a supply of godly preachers to feed the hungering faithful with the Word of God; the assembly turned the tables on him, however, by quashing petitions for liberty of conscience sponsored by Barbados’s congregationalists.8 Although they remained in New England, John Cotton, Thomas Hooker, and John Davenport began coordinating a transatlantic campaign to defend the congregational order from Presbyterian attacks in the Westminster Assembly. Cotton and Davenport explained and justified New England congregationalism in print through their respective books The Keys of the Kingdom and An Answer of the Elders of Several Churches. The Coleman Streeter Henry Overton, a member of John Goodwin’s church, sold Cotton’s pamphlet in his London book shop. Overton also offered New England’s First Fruits, a tract that glorified Independency by trumpeting the Bay Colony’s evangelical missions to both Native Americans and English colonies bereft of godly preaching. Thomas Weld, a returned Bay Colonist, had the tract printed by Richard Overton and Gregory Dexter. Dexter, however, would find the gospel of Weld’s colonial archenemy Roger Williams much more to his liking, and after collaborating with Williams during his 1643–44 stay in London, Dexter returned to New England with him.9 Jus t as differences over religion polarized the English around the Revolutionary Atlantic, so too did the question of allegiance to king or Parliament. Tensions over the political link to England had surfaced in the Bay Colony even before the English Revolution, most visibly in 1635, when Charles I revoked the Bay Colony charter and ordered its physical return to the crown. Within this context, John Cotton justified armed resistance should Laud, now the king’s chief minister for colonial affairs, try to force a royal governor on the colony. Massachusetts actually prepared defensive works in Boston Harbor in the event that this worst-case scenario materialized. With the advent of the Bishops’ Wars in Scotland, Cotton began preaching a series of millenarian sermons in the First Church of Boston, with politically transparent implications. The divine exhorted the saints around the English Atlantic to emulate the Scots, who had struck a covenant to resist the bishops. Resisting the Episcopal Antichrist in Britain, however, did not always lead to good news for the reformation workers of New England. John Tinker, one of John Winthrop’s business agents in London, wrote the governor in February 1640 that “the hopes of some reformation in England by the intended parliament” had slowed the rate of immigration to New England.

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“Troublesome times,” according to Tinker, were “approaching both within and without the Kingdom.” Back in New England, Roger Williams concurred, writing to Winthrop in August 1640 that Charles’s portended invasion of Scotland would result “in the general and grievous persecution of the saints.”10 When the news of the Long Parliament’s reform measures reached the colonies in late 1640 and early 1641, “the great liberty which the King left to Parliament” left settlers around the English Atlantic with mixed feelings. In New England, as John Winthrop wrote, it gave New England’s puritans “hope that we might obtain as much.” But after “consulting about [putting] ourselves under the protection of Parliament,” Winthrop recorded that the General Court “declined the motion.” The magistrates reasoned “that if we should, we must then be subject to all such laws as they should make,” a decision that squared with the logic informing Winthrop’s own response to Vane in 1637, when he declared that the king’s charter incorporated the colony as a sovereign power in its own right. One of the unanticipated effects of the English Revolution in New England, then, lay in strengthening Massachusetts’s claim that it was an autonomous commonwealth rather than a mere English colony; the future of the Magisterial Reformation in the Bay, as its proponents recognized, depended on the jealous preservation of its sovereignty from potential encroachments of both king and Parliament. As the historian Michael Winship has written, Winthrop believed that he presided over what effectually amounted to a republic or “free state” whose ties with England grew more tenuous with every passing day. A meddling Parliament was the last thing the founding father of the besieged City on a Hill desired. While recording the beheading of the earl of Strafford and the imprisonment of “the great officers and judges, bishops, and others” as achievements of “the general reformation both of church and state” in England, Winthrop hardly sounded a triumphant note. The Revolution had “caused all men to stay in England in expectation of a new world.” Trying to found a “new world” in the old, as Winthrop recognized, diminished the prospects for reformation already under way in New England, where more colonists were needed to gain demographic leverage over hostile natives. Turning the world upside down in England also threatened to turn the New England economy belly up, as the flow of “all foreign commodities,” particularly from England, “grew scarce and [made] our own of no price.” Bay Colony saints did, however, acknowledge their sympathy for the cause of God in England, voting on September 7, 1641, to observe a day of thanksgiving “for the good success of the Parliament.” The deputies and

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assistants of Massachusetts as well as the officers of other colonial courts in New England would proclaim many more such days of thanksgiving over the duration of the English Revolutionary era.11 The western riptide of revolution caught up the eastern seaboard in a colonial current of political violence, even as local governments desperately struggled to avoid being pulled under by the all-consuming vortex. Although most Virginians favored the king’s party, the assembly hardly steered the colony along a partisan course. Old Chesapeake traditions died hard in the face of new divisions across the sea. The pirate fleets of the earl of Warwick continued to troll the coastal tidewater despite the royalist sympathies of Governor Berkeley and his allies in the assembly. The economic cost of this puritan pillaging, however, along with widespread animosity to the puritan insurgency in Old England, inflamed popular royalism in Virginia and made the government’s job of keeping discord to a minimum doubly difficult. A flavor of the official reaction to such sentiment may be glimpsed in the case of a Virginian who toasted “the damnation of Pym’s God and the confusion of Parliament”; although Governor Berkeley and most of the assemblymen probably shared the sentiment, the man nevertheless found himself charged with disturbing the peace. But while the authorities tried to prevent antipuritan factionalism from breaking out into open fighting, they also forestalled godly politicking and church building, as we have seen in the case of Governor Berkeley’s reaction to the fledgling attempt to foster a preaching puritan clergy in Virginia. Across the Chesapeake Bay in the midst of this increasingly volatile situation, the Catholic haven of Maryland, established by the Calverts in 1634, became particularly vulnerable to militant Protestant intrigue. The freebooter Captain Richard Ingle seized the main chance in an attack against Maryland’s Catholic ascendancy, although the rising more resembled the piratical raids of Francis Drake than a principled Protestant insurgency. While Ingle’s 1644 bid for power ultimately failed, he did receive financial backing from a network of colonial planters that included Virginia’s William Claibourne and Bermuda’s Anthony Penniston. Thomas Allen, a London tobacco merchant, a trading partner of Penniston’s and a member of John Goodwin’s Coleman Street church who had lost business in the Chesapeake due to the rise of the Calverts, helped finance Ingle’s ill-fated insurrection.12 Reactions to the wars between the king and Parliament in England’s island colonies followed the same unpredictable course. In Barbados, where veterans from both sides had settled, the assembly ratified a proposal “not to receive any alteration of government until God shall be so merciful unto

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us as to unite the King and Parliament.” As a residual effect of the hostilities under way in Old England, rival factions of planters set sail for the old country, where they lobbied both king and Parliament to support their respective attempts to dominate the colony’s government. Like most of the other English colonies, Barbados would await the outcome of the war to establish its official position. Only Bermuda’s colonial government declared openly for Parliament, most probably because it had to answer to the directorate of the Bermuda Company. Royalists nonetheless made their feelings known in Bermuda. As Carla Gardina Pestana has demonstrated much more exhaustively than I have here, despite New England’s pronounced sympathies for Parliament and clear royalist leanings in the West Indies and the Chesapeake, most colonial governments pursued a determined course of official neutrality as a matter of political and economic self-interest.13 Wh i l e the political turmoil that England’s troubles churned up around the Atlantic world made it difficult for colonies to navigate clear courses of political allegiance, a seldom-studied series of constitutional revolutions swept through New England that paralleled England’s own revolution in important ways. But rather than following Old England’s example, New England’s constitutional revolutions actually anticipated the one that engulfed the old country. Since Rhode Island’s case stands out most clearly in this regard, I will begin there.14 In the late 1630s, in the wake of the Antinomian Controversy, a diaspora of antinomians from around the English Atlantic converged on the lands engulfing Narragansett Bay. The bulk of the migrants settled on Aquidneck Island, which they had purchased from the Narragansett sachem Miantanamo, a transaction that depended on the diplomatic overtures of Henry Vane and Roger Williams. Most of the Rhode Island settlers came from Massachusetts, veterans of Anne Hutchinson’s conventicle and William Aspinwall’s antinomian petitioning campaigns. Others such as Mark Lucar, who had been arrested alongside Samuel How in 1632, left London for Rhode Island in the midst of the Laudian inquisition. Many of Hutchinson’s Bay Colony adherents hailed originally from London; in all, of the eighty families who made up the original colonial cohort on Aquidneck, sixteen could trace their roots back to the city. Others reached Rhode Island after traveling a more circuitous route around England’s colonial dominions. “Divers godly men” from Ireland arrived on Aquidneck after first settling on St. Kitts. In the West Indies, the English colonists from Ireland had been “persecuted, and their liberty constrained” for subscribing to the teachings of William

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Collins, an Independent who struck John Winthrop as “a young scholar full of zeal.” Leaving St. Kitt’s for New England, Collins’s troop tried New Haven first, but feeling their liberty constrained again by John Davenport’s rigid theocracy, most of the flock removed to Hartford, then under the regime of Davenport’s former Coleman Street parishioner Gov. Edward Hopkins. Hearing of Anne Hutchinson’s teachings, the Spirit moved the bodies and souls of the migrants once again, compelling their exodus from Connecticut to Aquidneck. Winthrop believed that Anne Hutchinson’s “bosom friend” Jane Hawkins had seduced this globe-trotting batch of saints with witchery. But William Collins fell under a spell of a different kind and soon married a daughter of the antinomian prophet, also named Anne. But of all of the elder Hutchinson’s new allies on Aquidneck, Samuel Gorton, late of Plymouth, loomed the largest. Gorton is well known to scholars of colonial religion; his importance as a political revolutionary, however, remains underappreciated.15 Samuel Gorton, a clothier and “gentleman,” had left London for America in 1636 “to enjoy liberty of conscience in respect to faith toward God.” Once ashore in the Bay Colony, however, Gorton realized that the same zeal uniting settlers around the cause of reformation also led them to persecute those who expressed “erroneous opinions.” What Gorton deemed Christian righteousness, other saints called “blasphemous,” and over the course of his first three years in America, colonial judges banished him from the Plymouth and Bay Colonies for his “fantastical opinions.” Upon his banishment from Plymouth, Gorton declared to the assembled freemen: “Ye see good people, how ye are abused! Stand for your liberty!” At the same time that How and others were preaching Radical Reformation on Coleman Street, Gorton’s “turbulent carriages towards both magistrates and ministers,” in the words of Plymouth governor Edward Winslow, had done much to “blow the bellows” of the antinomian “heresy” and “sedition” then burning through New England.16 Sentenced to banishment by the Plymouth court in December 1637, Gorton and a group of disciples settled on Aquidneck Island, following the exile trail blazed by the Boston antinomians. When Gorton arrived, the colonists had already incorporated the town of Portsmouth “into a body politic,” electing William Coddington as “a judge among us” and William Aspinwall to serve as secretary, although the latter would soon be replaced by the former London antinomian William Dyer. The settlers struck a political “covenant” “according to the laws of God,” perhaps a reference to the Mosaic Judicials, the biblical legal code gathered from books in the Old Testament.

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Although most saints believed that legal reform should look to the principles of justice in the Mosaic laws as a means to remedy injustices in the existing legal system, extremists such as Aspinwall wanted to replace large swaths of the English legal and constitutional traditions with the literal adoption of parts of the biblical code. While ancient constitutional liberties such as petitioning would be preserved in Aspinwall’s scheme, he believed that a large-scale institution of the Mosaic Code could restore the primitive purity of the Christian community and thus serve as an apocalyptic agent for the rise of the kingdom of Christ on earth. Gorton, on the other hand, though sympathetic to the social justice vision driving the Mosaic reformers such as Aspinwall, believed that the millennial literalism behind the Mosaic ideal could become a “cunning device” that would “beguile” men to put false hope in the return of Christ when he “already dwelled in their hearts.” But while Aspinwall and Gorton disagreed about the place of the Mosaic Judicials in a reformed commonwealth, they did agree, along with the majority of Aquidneck’s inhabitants, that the political ambitions of the colony’s governor, the antinomian William Coddington, threatened to place the exiles under a form of magisterial tyranny as onerous as that exercised by the courts of Plymouth and Massachusetts.17 As an aspiring autocrat, Coddington had quickly incurred the animosity of a faction of Rhode Islanders led by Gorton, Aspinwall, and Hutchinson. By January 1639, Coddington’s ambition had excited a popular backlash that culminated in an important and often overlooked amendment to the colony’s original compact. According to the new provision, the colony’s freemen would assemble every three months to hold “the elders . . . accountable [for] all such cases, actions and rules which have passed through their hands. “Scanned and weighed by the word of Christ,” the court’s quarterly record of decisions would be made subject to the popular will of the colony. If the freemen were “pleased to dispense light to the contrary of what by the judge and elders hath been determined formerly . . . then and there it shall be repealed as the Act of the Body.” In other words, having compacted together to form their own government through a biblical mode of popular sovereignty, the colonists created a body politic that refused to devolve its sovereignty into the hands of elected magistrates. The saints in this godly commonwealth would have the final say over all legislation and government policy. The early Rhode Islanders have often been portrayed as a confused bunch of spiritual anarchists with little regard for the kind of commonwealth unity that the founders of the Bay Colony articulated. The evidence of the January 1639 Portsmouth compact, however, points to a dif-

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ferent conclusion. The exiles’ fierce devotion to their individual and collective spiritual sovereignty translated politically in America into a collective attempt to safeguard the public good not just from judicial enforcement of religious conformity but against magistrates who expected unlimited submission to their decisions in matters both spiritual and civil.18 Coddington saw the writing on the wall and left Portsmouth that April to found the town of Newport with the help of Dr. John Clarke, a surprising ally given that Clarke spent much of the rest of his political career opposing Coddington. Once in Newport, Coddington saw to it that the town’s new charter endowed him with a double vote on the eight-man court. In retaliation, the larger faction that remained in Portsmouth with Gorton and the Hutchinsons agreed in April 1639 to govern themselves by “the major voice” of the freemen, who would ratify or reject the court’s decisions. The Portsmouth colonists seemed here to follow the lead of Roger Williams and the freemen of Providence, who in August 1637 compacted for the “public good” to abide “all such orders or agreements” ratified “by the major consent” of those “incorporated together in a Towne fellowship.” Crucially, the Providence planters restricted the jurisdiction of their government to “only . . . civil things.” The direct effect of this ordinance meant that in the Narragansett country, settlers construed liberty of conscience as religious toleration, a freedom they would protect politically by democratic means. In Portsmouth, the Gorton/Hutchinson faction followed the same course, while they limited the governor’s term to one year in direct defiance of Coddington. But the position that Hutchinson took that April offered an even more radical political alternative than the democracy embraced by the colony’s men. Exile had strengthened rather than weakened Hutchinson’s antinomian convictions, which she carried through to their political conclusion by calling for “no magistracy”—the complete abolition of magistracy as an institution. Guided individually and collectively by the Word and will of God as discerned through the inspiration of the indwelling Holy Spirit, God’s people would form a government in and of themselves to arbitrate their own disputes without any legal hierarchy. Hutchinson’s stance, which paralleled that of the Anabaptists of the Continental Radical Reformation, made her the champion of the purest form of democracy in the English Atlantic. It’s hard to imagine that a gendered political consciousness did not figure importantly in Hutchinson’s radical political proscription: ending magistracy in a colony inspired by the prophetic voices of Hutchinson, Mary Dyer, and Jane Hawkins would have made preaching an even more integral part of political and legal decision making, which in turn would

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have elevated these female prophets into almost unprecedented positions of political power. The eventual exclusion of women from the de jure affairs of the commonwealth clarifies the starkly gendered limitations of what was otherwise the boldest experiment in political liberty at that time in the Atlantic world, save the multiracial democracies of the maroon colonies on Tortuga and Hispaniola.19 Coddington struck back against his political opponents first by having Aspinwall banished for sedition. No record survives of Aspinwall’s day in court, but gauging from his performance in Boston two years earlier, his confrontation with his old antinomian ally must certainly have elicited some sparks. Having dispatched Aspinwall, Coddington cooked up a charge of trespassing against Gorton to set the stage for a more decisive confrontation. Gorton certainly rose to the occasion when Coddington’s constables hauled him into court. Saluting the justices of Newport as “just-asses,” he went on to insult their pretended authority, calling them “saucy boys” and “jack-an-apes.” He stared down the governor and accused him of being an “abettor to riot, assault, and battery.” When the justices ordered him to be silent, he exclaimed that they had no sovereign authority to try him. The magistrates then decided on a more violent course of action. On their order, the sergeant-at-arms swept Gorton away and tied him to the pillory. When Gorton declared that Coddington himself should be whipped, the radical’s supporters rushed the guards. After a brief scuffle, a constable bound Gorton and administered a lashing. When it was over Gorton gathered his chains about him and, with the blood still pouring from his body, chased Coddington down the street, calling out to the governor that he had forgotten the irons he would need to persecute other saints.20 In thinking that such calculated acts of political terror would cow his critics into submission, Coddington certainly erred; if anything, the governor’s autocratic vision and Gorton’s steadfast defiance during his ordeal galvanized the opposition. In March 1641, freemen from both the island’s towns gathered at Portsmouth to ratify a new constitution. Despite Gorton’s departure, the new charter enshrined his radical concept of government through active popular sovereignty into law. The freemen “unanimously agreed” that their new “body politic” would be a “democracy or popular government.” Citing “democracy” explicitly as the organizing concept of their commonwealth represented a defiant declaration of unconventional yet experientially distilled political wisdom, for the freemen of Aquidneck had learned that “mixed constitutions” sanctioned the magisterial prerogative and thus opened the door to tyranny and corruption. The islanders de-

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fined democracy as “the power of the body of freemen, orderly assembled, or major part of them . . . to make or constitute just laws by which they will be regulated . . . [and to] depute from among themselves such ministers as shall see them faithfully executed between man and man.” The Rhode Islanders, in line with the thought of the French humanist Jean Bodin, made a careful distinction here, establishing themselves as a “popular government” as opposed to a mere “popular state,” the form that jurists in Connecticut and Massachusetts attributed to their polities. In Bodin’s construct, the “state” represented the sovereign body politic while “government” denoted the system by which political decisions were made.21 All popular states recognized that sovereignty flows originally from the people, but popular states could operate by governments invested with wide discretionary power and little popular accountability. The Rhode Islanders in contrast created a “popular government” of the most fundamental order: they constituted the entire body of the freemen as the legislative power, applying the Athenian ideal to a colonial commonwealth. The 1639 constitution of Aquidneck had allowed the islanders only to approve or reject laws of the elected magistrates’ making. Now magistrates would simply administer laws instead of making them, a reduction of the magisterial prerogative that John Winthrop likened to anarchy. With the constitutional reforms of 1641, the sovereign legislative power resided in the entire body of the freemen. In this way, while acknowledging the jurisdictional sovereignty of the English state, popular sovereignty would continue to thrive in Rhode Island as an active instrument of just government. Sovereignty would not devolve upon the magistrates, to make laws to which the people must quietly submit. While the 1639 compact had abolished the magisterial prerogative, the 1641 constitution made the antinomians of Aquidneck the legislative authors of their own political liberty, another revolutionary breakthrough that coincided in time with the constitutional revolution already underway in England. Events in Rhode Island had demonstrated how godly political reform could lead to antinomian democracy—a trend that the king’s party warned against a year later when Charles declared war on his opponents at Nottingham Castle.22 But like other revolutionaries in the English Atlantic at this time, the Rhode Islanders undertook radical political change as a means to achieve the wider ends of the Protestant Reformation and its apocalyptic pretensions. Immediately following the section in the 1641 constitution declaring that Aquidneck would be ruled as a “popular government,” the islanders stipulated that liberty of conscience would be defined constitutionally as

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toleration, not, as had been the case among most of the godly, as a requirement to worship the true and uncorrupted faith as determined by an ordained clergy and an unaccountable magistracy. The provision specified “by the authority of this present court that no one be accounted a delinquent for doctrine, provided it not directly be repugnant to the Government or laws established.” We can understand the long-term import and immediate purpose of the liberty of conscience provision through the Aquidneck colonist John Clarke’s reflections, written about a decade after the law’s passage. Clarke wrote that “for liberty of their consciences, and worship of their God, as their hearts were persuaded,” the saints had “fled from the persecuting hands of the Lordly Bishops” to cross the Atlantic to America “to the extreme hazard of their lives.” Echoing the words of Samuel How, Clarke blamed the persecuting spirit of the New England magistrates on the region’s “teachers” or ministers, who would “maintain their superstitious, humane, invented religion and worship, for filthy lucre’s sake.”23 But Clarke wrote that the “spirit, mind, [and] conscience . . . this . . . commander in men . . . is such a sparkling beam from the father of lights and spirits that it cannot be commanded over by men, devils, or angels.” In a godly commonwealth, the “spiritual administration” of error, as Clarke argued, could not justly be “managed . . . by a sword of steel.” Saints disputing with one another in the spirit of mutual forbearance would eventually arrive at “the word of truth . . . with spirits . . . convincing, converting, transforming, and as it were a-new creating,” bringing those in error “out of the Kingdom of darkness . . . into the glorious liberty of the . . . light.” Instrumentalizing the commonwealth as a defender of religious tolerance, Rhode Islanders looked forward to the experience of progressive revelation and the mystical wisdom it offered for those searching for the true path of reformation and the fulfillment of prophetic time that would bring about the kingdom of God on earth.24 Moving west from Narragansett Bay to the upper Connecticut River Valley, revolutionary constitution making proceeded along like antiprerogative lines, with a vital exception in religious affairs. Tellingly, much like their peers in Rhode Island, many of the Connecticut settlers had lived first in Massachusetts, where they had grown disenchanted with prerogative government. As the Bay Colonist and Pequot War veteran Israel Stoughton recalled, “[W]hen I came into the country in 1630 . . . the government was solely in the hands of the assistants. The people chose them magistrates and then they made laws, disposed lands, raised moneys, punished offenders, etc . . . at their discretion.” The court also kept the charter from public view,

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creating a situation where, as Stoughton explained, “the people did [not] know the patent nor what prerogative and liberty they had in the same.” The people’s ignorance of their liberty under the law left the magistrates with enough latitude to do what they pleased in the early years of the colony. In 1630, for instance, the magistrates elected John Winthrop to the governor’s seat for a two-year term, despite the fact that the charter stipulated annual gubernatorial elections by the freemen. Political opposition to this arrangement arose first in Watertown, the Bay Colony settlement founded by the Saltonstall family. In October 1631, the Watertown freemen protested that the court, headed by an appointed rather than elected governor, had levied an illegal tax to finance the construction of defensive works at Charlestown. The Watertown petition rehearsed the same arguments against arbitrary taxation that MPs had put forward three years earlier during the Petition of Right controversy, which the Saltonstalls and Robert Seeley, also of Watertown, would have experienced in all their intensity as former denizens of Coleman Street Ward. In the face of such historically resonant resistance, the court restored the gubernatorial franchise to the freemen in 1632. In 1634, the continuing demands made by Stoughton and others for greater popular accountability for the court led to the creation of a lower house of “deputies,” each to be elected by the freemen of the colony’s towns. The magistrates or “assistants,” however, reserved the “negative voice” or veto power over legislation proposed by deputies. Winthrop, opposing the reforms, called his opponents “disturbers of the house of Israel” and had Israel Stoughton barred from public office for questioning the justice of the assistants’ veto power.25 As it did for their peers in Rhode Island, the New England frontier offered a refuge for the English settlers of the Connecticut River Valley; the comparison should not be carried too far, however, as Rhode Islanders purchased their land from Indians while Connecticut’s colonists ultimately obtained theirs through violent conquest. This bloody course in Connecticut was not inevitable, however, and was several years in the making. In 1634 Coleman Street’s Richard Saltonstall Sr. organized investors in London for a project to colonize the Connecticut River Valley to cash in on the fur trade. At the same time back in New England, following Robert Seeley’s exploratory venture along the Connecticut River in 1634, Thomas Hooker’s congregation at Newtown unsuccessfully sought the court’s approval to remove to the valley, where colonists had already begun to settle. A year later, a small flotilla set sail from London for the prospective colony, commissioned by Saltonstall and provisioned by one of his Coleman Street neighbors, the

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merchant and future Connecticut governor Edward Hopkins. In 1637, Hopkins himself and a large group of Coleman Street residents migrated to New England with a group of migrants from Holland led by the puritan stalwart and former pastor of St. Stephen’s John Davenport. As we saw in chapter 2, the Connecticut settlers scattered up and down the length of the valley in the midst of the upheavals occasioned by the Antinomian Controversy and the Pequot War, with Davenport’s loyalists establishing the colony of New Haven, while Hopkins and Hooker consolidated the river towns of New Watertown (later Wethersfield), Hartford, and Windsor into the colony of Connecticut.26 In 1638, the former Coleman Streeters Theophilus Eaton and Edward Hopkins brought the Pequot War to an official end through the Hartford Treaty, which gave the new colony of Connecticut sovereign jurisdiction over much of the northern river valley. The treaty thus completed the obliteration of the Pequot body politic, a process that had depended upon the annihilation of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Pequot bodies in a bloody if not genocidal war launched in the service of a lie. Nonetheless, writing to the Bay Colony Standing Council, Captain Israel Stoughton observed that the frontier war, by wresting the valley free from its “savage” inhabitants, would “provide for the poor servants of Christ that are unprovided for.” In other words, puritans could observe the golden rule within their own community in good conscience by providing land for the poor, even if they had to wipe Connecticut clean of Pequots to do so. But the drive for profit, not Christian charity, most marked the immediate postwar period, with colonists buying and selling dozens of Pequot survivors as slaves and trafficking seventeen into slavery on Providence Island. Godly pioneers on the frontier then purchased “negro” slaves from Providence Island who had been brought back to Boston on the same ship that had delivered the Pequots into bondage. Hopkins, who served as Connecticut’s governor seven times between 1640 and 1654; Theophilus Eaton, who reigned for fifteen years as New Haven’s governor; and John Davenport, the founding divine of New Haven, Coleman Streeters all, became slave owners on a New England frontier that left them free and clear to pursue religious reformation according to their own devices; it also freed them to pursue political reformation with the same latitude. The settlers’ political freedom in the colonies of the Connecticut River Valley was thus bound up with the political enslavement of the Pequots, which in turn facilitated the bodily enslavement of Pequot people, a process that provided an economic boon to colonists in a laborscarce colony. Culturally speaking, the catastrophic change that the godly

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visited upon the Pequots produced a racialized model of Christian charity, where the godly expelled “strangers from Christianity” from the jurisdiction of the royal law of Christ. Although originally envisioned as objects and instruments of reformation, the “savages” had become obstacles to reformation’s progress in America; the elect thus felt justly compelled to remove the Pequots from the kingdom of Christ, even though the “just war” the colonists allegedly fought was actually justified by fabrication, prosecuted through murder, and settled through enslavement.27 Not long before the Pequot War, New England’s colonists had depended on Indians for their very survival; with the war’s conclusion, colonists could begin subjecting Indians to their own dominion, launching themselves on a course of creative destruction that enabled sites of colonial conquest to become places of revolutionary political experimentation.28 Over the course of 1638 and early 1639, settlers in the colony of Connecticut framed a civil constitution to suit the congregational church way, the ecclesiastical form most of them favored. On May 31, 1638, Hooker delivered a sermon in which he declared that the “choice of public magistrates” belonged to the people of God’s own allowance”—in other words, the “elect” freemen who had settled the colony. As “the foundation of authority” in the state, they could justly “set bound and limits of the power and places unto which they may call” their representatives. As Hooker wrote elsewhere, elected magistrates were “superior as officers, when they keep the rule” of law, “but inferior as members” of the commonwealth, “and in subjection to any” and all of its freemen if they would “break the rule” of law. “So it is in any corporation; so in Parliament. The whole can censure any part.” By placing such radical restraints on the magisterial prerogative, Hooker steered Connecticut in the direction of a civil constitution favored by advocates of the Radical Reformation such as the early separatist John Robinson.29 Hopkins played a decisive part in the subsequent drafting of the Connecticut constitution. Toward the end of 1638, the court appointed Hopkins and three others to a constitutional committee in order “to ripen some orders that were left unfinished” from the previous spring, when the colony first began the work of laying out its government. Hopkins and his fellow committee members produced a constitution, the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, which, in accord with Hooker’s vision, drew directly from Robinson’s democratic model for ordering a separatist gathered church. To ensure that magistrates could not exercise a “negative” voice over the town deputies and so elide popular accountability, the Connecticut court, unlike the Bay Colony’s, would vote as one body. The Fundamental Orders also de-

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prived the colony’s governor of a veto prerogative. Finally, the constitution gave the freemen as a body the power to censure the court by convening their own assembly if their elected officials violated or failed to uphold the rule of law. Importantly, however, Connecticut’s constitution, in contrast to Rhode Island’s, did not include a provision preventing the court from enforcing religious conformity. This would have gone against the entire purpose behind the framing of the Fundamental Orders, whose authors designed it, in continuity with the wishes of the freemen, “to maintain and preserve the liberty and purity of the gospel of our Lord Jesus which we now profess, as also the discipline of the Churches . . . according to the truth of the . . . gospel.” Thus, drawing from Radical Reformation tenets while rejecting toleration, the settlers designed a revolutionary constitution to abolish unaccountable and discretionary political institutions, making political innovation a means to the greater end of moral and religious reformation.30 The settlers of the colony of New Haven set about erecting their own constitutional framework at the same time as their peers in the commonwealths of Connecticut and Rhode Island. John Davenport and a wealthy cadre of his former Coleman Street parishioners invented a constitution that, like Connecticut’s, formed a civil government to serve the interest of its gathered church. John Winthrop wrote that “the way of God has always been to gather his churches out of the world, so now the world or the civil state must be raised out of the churches,” but while this line of thought guided the political reform undertaken by the Bay Colony, Connecticut, and New Haven, each colony adopted different means to this common end. In 1639, Davenport successfully pushed for the adoption of the biblical commonwealth that John Cotton had tried in vain to incorporate in Massachusetts.31 That June, New Haven’s freemen elected the Coleman Streeter Robert Newman to serve as secretary for the colony’s constitutional proceedings. Newman recorded that when Davenport proposed that the franchise should be restricted to church members, an anonymous colonist protested that “all the free planters ought to resume this power into their own hands.” The former Coleman Streeter Theophilus Eaton, the wealthiest merchant in Connecticut and perhaps New England entire, recommended that the frame of government should be modeled after the London Court of Aldermen, where merchant princes exercised a veto over the more democratic Common Council. Both alternative arguments foundered, and the Davenport/Cotton biblical commonwealth carried the day, with the franchise relegated to church members. The “Fundamental Orders of New Haven,” as the settlers called their constitution, empowered free-

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men to elect a court of “magistrates and officers . . . to have the power of transacting all the public civil affairs of this plantation.” The last clause left out any semblance of popular accountability for the court, which would also decide all civil and criminal cases, thus forfeiting the common-law tradition of freeborn Englishmen to be tried by a jury of their peers. With New Haven’s political and religious order in place, three Coleman Streeters stood at the head of the colony’s political and religious hierarchy. Davenport became the pastor of the church, while the freemen elected Eaton governor and Seeley to the military command of “marshal.”32 Adding Richard Saltonstall the elder, moving force in the Saybrook Company, and Connecticut’s governor and constitutional framer Edward Hopkins to this list, we see how the early history of New England’s southwestern frontier, one of the most hotly contested colonial spaces in the Atlantic, had been largely decided by saints from Coleman Street Ward. The experience of godly dissent and the accumulation of wealth, learning, and political influence, once transferred to America, had transformed saints marginalized by the Stuarts in England into colonial power brokers. Settling on a civil constitution proved much more difficult in Massachusetts. In 1641, the Bay Colony ratified its “Body of Liberties.” Easily the most exhaustive of any of the colonial legal codes, the Body of Liberties mixed English common-law tradition with the Mosaic laws, enumerating ninety-eight civil statutes regarding inheritance, fines, debt, electoral laws, the judicial process, militia conscription, and master-servant relations, and twelve capital statutes drawn from the Old Testament. But as the political scientist J. S. Maloy has observed, while the Body of Liberties strove to make magistrates accountable to the more democratic council of deputies, it did not abolish the magistrate’s negative voice, the very flashpoint of political conflict that had helped catalyze mass migration from Massachusetts to Connecticut. Indeed, a year after its implementation, the author of the Body of Liberties, Nathaniel Ward, along with Richard Saltonstall the younger, now a magistrate himself, seized upon this widespread frustration to reorganize the Bay Colony’s political structures more along the lines of a popular government. Saltonstall struck first with a diatribe against the Standing Council, arguing that it amounted to a “sinful innovation” that, in violation of the charter, gave its members lifelong terms and seemingly unrestricted discretionary power. When Winthrop initiated proceedings against him, Saltonstall’s fellow assistants refused to censure him, perhaps more in fear of the predictable popular backlash than out of any ideological sympathy.33 Making the case for pervasive prerogative power under commonwealth forms of government, Winthrop argued that “if we should change from

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a mixed aristocracy to a mere democracy” or “popular government” like Rhode Island’s or Connecticut’s, it would amount to “a manifest breach of the fifth Commandment,” as “we have no warrant in scripture for it: there was no such government in Israel.” Winthrop grounded his thinking here in early modern social thought as well as in biblical precedent, holding that the head of the body politic must, according to natural law and providential ordination, govern its dependent members. Democracy disrupted the harmony of this arrangement by making the head subject to the will of the members. Such a perverse prospect truly horrified Winthrop, who grew expansive on the subject. “Among most civil nations,” he argued, “democracy . . . is accounted the meanest and worst of all forms of government and therefore in writers it is branded with reproachful epithets, as bellua mutorum capitum, a monster.” Monsters devour, leaving appetite to overcome reason, which the saints equated with God’s will. Such was the case of the commonality; when it obeyed its own appetites rather than God’s will, it became a savage, ungovernable beast, a many-headed monster that left social anarchy and civil strife in its bloody and destructive wake.34 Winthrop’s fear of monsters had a decidedly gendered dimension, and the seditious patriarchal inversions of Anne Hutchinson and Mary Dyer had exacerbated it to an exceptionally ugly and vindictive degree. In his account of the Antinomian Controversy, drafted during his showdown with Saltonstall, Winthrop wrote that just as the women’s “monstrous opinions” had miscarried in the Bay Colony, so too had their natural pregnancies, which for the governor represented a sure mark of divine retribution. Both Hutchinson and Dyer had given birth to deformed stillborn infants, what contemporaries called “monster-births,” Dyer during the Antinomian Controversy itself and Hutchinson four years later. Winthrop likened these “monstrous births” to the antinomians’ “monstrous errors.” The female upstarts had tried to conceal their miscarriages, Winthrop noted, signaling yet another grotesque set of inversions: the women had expressed private views in public that had disturbed the peace while they had been perversely keeping private what they should have made public knowledge. In such an auspicious age of reform, Winthrop warned, the godly in Old and New England ignored at their own expense the wrath God visited upon the perpetrators of such dark deeds.35 Wh i l e many colonists would have shared Winthrop’s view that Hutchison and Dyer had been punished from above, more would have patently disagreed with his general conclusion that resisting magisterial rule based on

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conscience amounted to a “monstrous error,” particularly when the Standing Council, contrary to the colony’s charter, applied its self-proclaimed prerogative to the monstrous prospect of war. Here an important case that has generated very little scholarly attention, again involving the former Coleman Streeter Richard Saltonstall, can be instructive. In the spring of 1643, a faction of the French in Acadia led by the Huguenot Charles La Tour, then embattled in a civil war with the colony’s Catholics headed by Charles D’Aulnay, disembarked in Boston with a force of over one hundred men. The Frenchmen were not on a springtime excursion; they had come to Boston seeking support against D’Aulnay. La Tour soon put his force on display on Boston Common through a series of military drills, a show of strength calculated to convince Governor Winthrop that refusing to help would not be well taken. In contrast to Winthrop, however, Saltonstall stood fast against such intimidation and wrote against a joint martial initiative with La Tour, declaring that “wars are extreme remedies and are not to be enterprised unless their causes will bear out all manner of effects and consequences.” But in the meantime, Winthrop had convinced the unelected Standing Council, which had no constitutional legitimacy, to promise La Tour the colony’s support. Using discretionary power without any basis in Massachusetts law, the council sanctioned Bay Colony “privateers” to set sail and plunder the property of D’Aulnay’s allies in Acadia. But as Saltonstall wrote, Bay Colony pirates without a legitimate “commission of state” would “die the Devil’s martyr”—a comment that exposed the false colors of the Protestant crusade that the councilors had flown over the proposed expedition. Saltonstall and his petitioners were also “very sorry to consider” the extent to which the council’s piratical venture departed from a “representative” or accountable “course” of government. In prosecuting such an unjust war, Saltonstall wrote, it would have been “better than nothing” had had “the voices of the people” been with the council. But far from earning the people’s support, the popular wind seemed “to blow strong in the teeth” of the council’s design, due to the colonists’ fear that D’Aulnay’s French faction, by way of reprisal, might wreak death, destruction, and physical slavery on the freemen of Massachusetts, much as the Spanish had on the piratical colonists of Providence Island. The petitioners ultimately based their appeal “on the religious discharge of our own consciences, [which] will not permit us to be silent so long as there is any room for us to speak.” But what about the threat that La Tour’s forces posed to Boston? There was obviously much more at stake here than Winthrop’s and Saltonstall’s respective positions, viewed disparately from Boston and

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Ipswich, on whether La Tour was in a position to overrun the colony. Saltonstall and the petitioners dismissed the alliance with La Tour and thus the grounds for war against the Acadian Catholics as unjust; they sought at the same time to abolish the magisterial prerogative to make war, all to ensure for the future that the colony would go to war only for just reasons. Putting Saltonstall’s efforts here within a diachronic Atlantic context illuminates their wider revolutionary significance, as his petition against the French war and Parliament’s Militia Bill both strove in the same year to render the war-making power of government accountable to freeborn English people, wherever they lived around the Atlantic.36 The urgency of Saltonstall’s antiwar petition may have been driven in part by the wars that raged all around him in early New England. On the western frontier, a conflagration between the Dutch and their Indian enemies threatened to spill over into the lands of English settlers, who also feared being engulfed by the hostilities that had commenced between the Narragansetts and the Mohegans. Within this worrisome context, the Bay Colony, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven entered into an alliance called the United Colonies, a confederation pursued most zealously by Connecticut’s governor Hopkins and New Haven’s governor Eaton. According to its articles of agreement, the United Colonies existed to defend the English from the Dutch, who “may prove injurious to us or our posterity,” and “the natives [who] have formerly committed sundry insolence and outrages upon several plantations of the English.” But most importantly, the confederation would protect the colonists’ right to “enjoy the liberties of the Gospel in purity with peace,” free from the Indian menace without and the antinomian threat within. Inventing themselves as the armed embodiment of the New England Way, the United Colonies thus set out to define both Indians and antinomian exiles in Rhode Island as enemies of civilization and reformation. At the same time, this military alliance seems to have undermined the revolutionary origins of Connecticut’s civil constitution, as the colony gave its assistants the “negative” voice in the very year that the United Colonies formed. In an even larger sense, 1643 proved to be a signal year in the ongoing invention of the congregational New England Way. As the transatlantic debate over the future course of reformation proceeded in print through the auspices of Reverends Davenport, Hooker, and Cotton, politicians such as Winthrop, Eaton, and Hopkins secured its survival at home through an intercolonial military confederation based on a consensus platform of political and religious principles, ones that they defined according to magisterial principles and against the interconnected dangers of Indian savagery and antinomian sedition.37

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The clearest Indian target of the United Colonies, the Narragansett people, developed their own ideological response to the threat that the confederated forces of the Magisterial Reformation posed not just to their power but indeed to their very existence. As Miantanomi told an assembly of his Montauk tributaries on Long Island in 1642, the settlers, “having gotten our land,” had emptied it of “deer, turkey, fish, and fowl.” Unless the Indians became one as the English were, “we shall all be gone shortly” since “we shall all be starved.” Previously having gathered the “Moquakues and Mo-hauks” to his side, Miantaomi urged the Montauks to enter the Indian confederation. In “joining with us,” they would “fall upon them all,” meaning the colonists, “at one appointed day.” Dutch as well as English colonists came under this proscription, which illustrated an ideological shift among the Narragansetts and their tributaries, where securing their interests vis-àvis European newcomers now entailed the latter’s annihilation, supplanting earlier attempts at cooperation.38 The United Colonies recognized this shift in their articles, citing the fact that Indians “have of late combined themselves against us” as a compelling motive for their military alliance. With their newfound power, the confederation commissioners ordered the execution of Miantamomi in September 1643, ridding themselves of their most powerful Indian opponent.39 But while ideology drove colonists and Indians to forge alliances against each other, mutual self-interest could also lead them to cooperate in new unions. Colonist-Indian relations in early New England, of course, never devolved into a simple native-settler binary. The Mohegans, for instance, used the Treaty of Hartford to combine with Massachusetts out of a longheld desire to supplant the Narragansetts, formerly allied with the Bay, as the dominant Indian player in New England political affairs, a position that owed much to the Narragansett control of the making of wampum, the currency that colonists and Indians used to conduct trade. Indeed, the Mohegan sachem, Uncas, oversaw Miantanomi’s murder. The Narragansetts, now bereft of friends in Massachusetts, could count on only the exile band of antinomians in their midst to use as leverage against their native and settler enemies. Unfortunately for the Narragansetts, the Bay Colony had begun to entertain serious designs on their territory, not least because of the commercial promise held out by its wide rivers and deep harbors. In particular, Massachusetts coveted Pawtuxet, a tract that its clients, led by William Arnold, claimed to have purchased from the Narragansetts, although Samuel Gorton and his followers argued that they had purchased the same land from the same Indian society. The key difference between the Bay-backed Arnold claim and the Gortonists’ claim was that the latter had

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bought Pawtuxet directly from Miantamomi, while some of the sachem’s unhappy underlings, Pomham and Sessicus, had issued the Arnold title. By objective settler and Indian criteria, the Gortonists had clear title to the land, but this in no way deterred Massachusetts from pursuing its claims to the point of violence. Far from a settler-versus-Indian conflict, the contest over Pawtuxet saw natives and colonists joining with each other to promote their mutual self-interest against rival natives and colonists who had joined for the same purpose.40 The Bay Colony’s designs on Pawtuxet caused Gorton’s and Anne Hutchinson’s followers to fear for their lives. Winthrop had proclaimed Gorton “a man not fit to live on the face of the earth,” while Hutchinson herself had told a Massachusetts delegation that their churches were of Antichrist—a violation of the Body of Liberties capital statute against blasphemy. To make matters worse, the Rhode Islanders rightly suspected that their own governor, William Coddington, sided with Massachusetts in the controversy. The Bay Colony’s ambitions and Coddington’s machinations put the Narragansett colonists into an uproar, prompting another cycle of political crisis and intercolonial migration. Anne Hutchinson and her extended family, including that of her son-in-law William Collins, late of Ireland and St. Kitts, moved to New Netherlands, settling on Pelham Bay near the present-day Bronx. Gorton and his followers moved to nearby Shawomet, “with the free consent of the natives,” on lands they had purchased outright from Miantanomi. The freemen of Providence had a longer journey in mind for Roger Williams, commissioning him for a mission to London to secure a parliamentary patent incorporating Providence and Aquidneck into the colony of Rhode Island, vital legal protection against Bay Colony aggression. I will pick up Williams’s story in London later in the chapter.41 As both the Rhode Islanders and their enemies in Massachusetts understood, there was more to the Pawtuxet affair than a dispute over colonial boundaries; indeed, the controversy linked together critical questions concerning the sovereignty of English law in the colonies, the course of reformation there, and the rights of Native American societies to govern themselves. In a series of exchanges with Winthrop from November 1642 to September 1643, Samuel Gorton articulated the principles of a Radical Reformation saint and a freeborn Englishman vested in the tradition of the common law and ancient constitution. He criticized the clerical enemies of antinomians, calling them tithe-fattened “wizards” who “according to the flesh” in the “audacious spirit of whoredoms” had raised up a “shadow” of church “without substance.” Gorton reserved an even more scorching

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indictment for Winthrop himself. “To satisfy his own lusts,” the governor had made “himself a god, by reigning over the bodies and estates of men,” a pointed blast at the politically and economically enslaving power of the Court of Assistants and Winthrop’s Standing Council. With “consciences . . . purged by law,” the legalists on the Massachusetts magistracy used their offices to set up “a tabernacle to Moloch,” the false god of the Old Testament whom the powerful appeased with human sacrifice. Reflecting on the harsh material conditions of his exile and the devastation of the Pequots, Gorton condemned the magistrates for using their authority to deprive “women and children of things necessary” and to take “the precious lives of men” to “extend themselves.” In contrast, Gorton claimed with some justice that “we profess right unto all men,” meaning native and settler alike, and do no “violence” to “any . . . at all.”42 Instead of living under “the laws of our native country [which] should be named amongst them, yea those ancient statute laws,” Gorton observed that Massachusetts had made the antinomians subject to “pretended and devised laws [which] we have stooped under, to the robbing and spoiling of our goods, the livelihood of our wives and children.” He saluted Winthrop as the “Great and Honoured Idol General” who by the “sleights of Satan” endeavored “to subject and make slaves” of all those within and without his jurisdiction. In contrast, Gorton leveled all under the liberating sovereignty of King Jesus. Since God was no respecter of persons, freemen were “coheirs in Christ” and consequently “brothers,” not masters and slaves rendered so by what Gorton, echoing Samuel How, called “humane learning.” In an exceptionally egalitarian if not breathless vision of political justice that he saw encompassing the entire Atlantic world, Gorton wrote: Now the rule is evident that if the ministration of justice and judgment belongs to no officer, but to a man as a brother, then to every brother, and if to every brother, whether rich or poor, ignorant or learned, then every Christian in a commonwealth must be king, and judge, and sheriff and captain, and Parliament man, and rule, and that not only in New England but in Old, and not only in Old, but in all the Christian world; down with all officers from their rule, and set up every brother for to rule.

Gorton here spoke not to literally endorse an egalitarian anarchy brought into being by an abolition of political office; instead he was using a rhetoric of excess to purvey his conviction that ultimate political sovereignty in a commonwealth was equally shared by all men. He predicted that many would denounce this democratic concept of commonwealth government as

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“the establishment of all confusion, and the setting of anarchy then worse than tyranny.” But experience had taught Gorton that New England’s magistrates rather than its antinomians reigned as the region’s real anarchists, as they wielded power without regard to the laws of God or man. Unwilling to master their own avarice, they sought to master others in the name of God.43 Gorton prophesied that the New England Way, as constructed by his enemies in their magisterial image, would “bring forth nothing but fruit onto death.” Unbound by law, “Levitical Sacrificers” in the Bay Colony court and clergy had made violence their rule. Those who resisted, as the first New Englanders favoring adult baptism discovered in the early 1640s, could expect “incision on the nose, division of the ear from the head, stigmatization on the back, [and] suffocation of the veins.” The chafing strain of political bondage was real for the religious dissenters whom the court “strangled in the flesh with a halter” for their opinions. Banishment also placed nonconformists in peril of mortal dangers on the frontier. Tragically, this proved to be the case for Anne Hutchinson and her family, who were murdered in September 1642 by Siwanoy Indians then in arms against the Dutch in the conflict called Kieft’s War. Gorton blamed the court for terrorizing the Hutchinsons into fleeing Rhode Island for the frontier war zone where they eventually lost their lives. The radical rightly predicted that Winthrop and his confederates would gloat over the “horrible massacre, now made at the Dutch plantation, of our loving country-men, women and children.” But, he cautioned, “do not . . . beguile yourselves in crying out against the errors of those so miserably fallen,” for God himself would draw his sword against hypocrites and tyrants. Repeating a scriptural phrase that had come into use among the revolutionaries in Old England, Gorton warned that “the axe is laid to the root of . . . every tree that brings not good fruit according to the law.” The radicals’ opponents in the Bay proceeded with equal resolve, declaring the settlers at Shawomet “men fitted for the slaughter.”44 A week after orchestrating Miantanomi’s murder, Winthrop and the Standing Council ordered the militia to move against the Gortonists. We know from the introduction to this chapter what transpired next at Shawomet. After Gorton refused to submit to the authority of the Bay Colony magistracy at gunpoint, he hung an English flag, a symbol of England’s ancient laws, over the fortified cabin and declared that the only true sovereign civil power binding all the colonists lay in the common law, to which he would appeal by right. The militia opened fire, shredding the English ensign and pounding the cabin with bullets so as to “make the house we

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were in our grave,” as Gorton put it. The siege continued for “divers days” until the Gortonists finally gave out. With their homes burned to the ground and their cattle slaughtered or stolen for profit by Bay Colonists in arms, Captain Edward Johnson chained Gorton and eight of his followers for the march to Boston and a capital trial before the magistracy. As Gorton and two of the other prisoners, John Wickes and Randall Holden, later described the ordeal, Johnson’s forces “presently seized upon our arms and carried us all away like captives and slaves” while Pomham’s warriors pillaged what remained of their property. The Gortonists left behind three settlers, who eventually died as a result of the siege. On trial in Boston the Gortonists “desired our writing might be heard in open court, that it might appear what was in it.” This was denied, as Gorton related, because “the affirmation of the bench,” or the word of the magistrates alone, was the sole evidence by which the court would contemplate their execution for blasphemy. Once again the magistrates, legalists in religion but laws unto themselves in civil matters, wielded unrestricted prerogative against antinomians who had dared to defy their authority. Nonetheless, the injustice of the proceedings and the subsequent sentence of forced labor in “bolts and chains” imposed upon Gorton and his cadre gave them another stage to voice their radical views on religion and the sovereign powers of civil government.45 From the perspective of the Gortonists, the slavery of arbitrary government had resulted in their physical bondage during a time of acute political crisis in the Bay Colony, overlapping in time with Indian wars and the popular opposition that Saltonstall and others had galvanized within the colony against the magisterial discretion of the General Court. Many in Massachusetts consequently understood the Gortonists’ capture, trial, and forced servitude to the state as an especially vivid and disturbing parallel to the political bondage they suffered under their own government. The outpouring of outrage that greeted the spectacle of colonists serving as slaves for demanding a trial according to the laws of Old England forced the General Court to emancipate the Gortonists in March 1644. The General Court’s situation only worsened when Gorton returned to Rhode Island and began negotiations with the Narragansetts to form a unified front against the encroachments of the Bay Colony. As the radical later recalled, Miantanomi’s successors, Pessecus and Cannonicus, along with “diverse sachems and their chief counselors,” commiserated with the Shawomet colonists about their common plight. The Indians believed, according to Gorton, “that their condition might in great measure be paralleled with ours”; the evidence seemed convincing, as the Bay Colony had destroyed Shawomet, murdered

im age 5. The conflict between the Radical and Magisterial Reformations in New England was no mere theological tangle. For the godly, the stakes involved no less than the cosmic fate of humankind as it hung in the balance within the worldwide struggle between the forces of Christ and Antichrist. Within this context, territorial disputes between colonists of both factions and their Indian allies could reach the point of violence, as they did in 1643 on the shores of Narragansett Bay, when as depicted here, militiamen from Massachusetts laid siege to Samuel Gorton’s antinomian settlement at Shawomet. Image taken from William Cullen Bryant and Sydney Howard Gay, A Popular History of the United States, 4 vols. (London: Sampson, Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1876), 2:83. Photo appears courtesy of The Newberry Library (F 83 .126).

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Miantanomi, encouraged Pomham in his sedition against the Narragansett government, and appropriated the “goods and chattels . . . houses, lands, and labours” of colonists and Indians alike. The Narragansetts now feared that they would suffer the same fate as their old enemies the Pequots, who had seen their sovereignty usurped, their people massacred, and their survivors enslaved. But the Rhode Islanders now reassured their Indian friends that they were both “subjects to such a noble state in Old England that however far off from our King and state . . . we should have redress,” which Gorton planned to gain by following Williams to England. Without any other options left, the Narragansetts grasped at this straw, which gave them new confidence. When the Bay Colony sent emissaries to the Narragansetts to press their claims, Pessicus and Cannonicus made them wait two hours in the rain for their answer: since Indians and colonists alike were “subjects unto the same King and State,” the Narragansetts refused to submit to the jurisdiction of the Bay Colony. Gorton’s alliance with the Narragansetts had made good on the tragic plea Anne Hutchinson had made to the Siwanoy Indians before they killed her. Hutchinson had said that so-called savages and seditionists of New England were “all one Indian,” having been cast as the common enemy of their colonial opponents.46 A c c om pa n i e d by Randall Holden and John Green, Samuel Gorton left New England in September 1644 to secure a charter for Shawomet, disembarking in London less than a year after another turbulent spirit, Roger Williams, had arrived there on a similar mission for Providence and Aquidneck. Although Gorton and Williams disagreed on religious doctrine, did not get along personally, and did not work together in London, they did pursue the same political end in the capital: enlisting the revolutionary English government to preserve the spiritual and civil sovereignty of colonists and Indians in the Narragansett Bay region. As events would reveal, Henry Vane, the antinomians’ steadfast defender in New England and now one of the most powerful men in revolutionary England, would prove critical to the success of the Rhode Islanders’ missions. Vane had made sure to reestablish close ties with Williams when the latter journeyed to London in July 1643. Sir Henry invited the new arrival to lodge with him in his elegant townhome on Charing Cross Road, not far from the Houses of Parliament. Seasoned by their experiences around the English Atlantic, they agreed that the godly’s cause in America and England lay in “promoting of the Kingdom of . . . Jesus Christ, wherein are comprehended our liberties and duties, both as men and as Christians.” Friends in

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New England, Williams and Vane would become so again in Old England, where they also strengthened their political ties. Successor to the recently deceased John Pym as leader of the Long Parliament’s “war party,” Vane had a wide purview of the inner workings of the revolutionary government at home and abroad through his positions on the parliamentary militia and public safety committees, his appointment as treasurer of the navy, and his work on the Committee for Foreign Plantations (CFP). Vane’s place on this last parliamentary body as well as his ideological affinities with Williams improved the latter’s chances for success in London.47 Although Vane’s support did matter, it certainly did not make victory for Williams certain, for Massachusetts had deputed the former New Englanders Hugh Peter and Thomas Weld, now living in London, to contest his claims. Peter opposed Vane in New England but had allied politically with him in London and so shrank from this role, but Weld pursued it with vigor, pushing the CFP, staffed as it was by veteran colonialists such as Lord Saye and Seele, Samuel Vassal, and Coleman Street’s William Spurstowe, to bring Rhode Island under the jurisdiction of the Bay Colony. To discredit Williams’s godly credentials, Weld chose the route of guilt by association, publishing Winthrop’s attack on New England’s antinomians. Titled A Short Story of the Rise, Reign and Ruin of the Antinomians, the book amounted to a scathing masterpiece of heresiography, turning to the history of Continental Anabaptism to show how Radical Reformation tenets, “heretical” in principle, led to violent subversion in practice if not properly contained. Parallel to John Taylor’s rendering of Samuel How, Winthrop portrayed his antinomian foes in America as successors to the infamous John of Leyden, whose revolt in the German city of Munster brought all property, including wives, into communal ownership. The rebels had also slaughtered the rulers of the city, something Winthrop knew would capture the attention of puritan grandees faced with mobs of unruly commoners on the streets of revolutionary London. Winthrop wrote that Leyden’s heresies had traveled with the Family of Love to England, flourished there through conventicling, and eventually washed ashore in New England with Anne Hutchinson. To avoid alienating the now powerful Vane, Winthrop’s tract focused the blame for New England’s antinomian ordeal on Hutchinson. As we already know, for Winthrop the proof of Hutchinson’s “monstrous errors” lay in her “monstrous births,” a contention that the governor laid out in his Short Story.48 Winthrop also made sure to point out that Hutchinson’s male devotees had failed to rally to the defense of their colonial peers during his holy war against the Pequots, who were portrayed in the book

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as cruel, oppressive, murderous savages in league with Satan. In this light, the antinomians’ unwillingness to join in the Pequot campaign made their heresy, subversion, and sedition appear almost bottomless. But by excommunicating, disarming, and banishing the antinomians while crushing the Pequots, Winthrop argued, the forces of the Magisterial Reformation in New England had defused the explosive dual threats of demonic savagery and heretical sedition. As a result, the forces of good in America had managed to avoid the dismal end of the Munster burgers. Reminding his readers of the precedent of antinomian disaster on the Continent, Winthrop wanted to convince his English audience that granting enthusiasts a colony in New England could lead to further catastrophe; tolerating them in Old England, he argued, could cause the collapse of the entire Magisterial Reformation. Framed within this context, Williams’s mission for a colonial charter seemed to endanger both New and Old England by establishing a transatlantic breeding ground for heretical seditionists.49 Much like Williams, Gorton discovered both allies and adversaries among returned New Englanders in London. In terms of the latter, Gorton found himself locked in political combat with Plymouth’s Edward Winslow, who had succeeded Weld as the Bay Colony’s agent in the capital. Winslow had migrated on the Mayflower, written several pamphlets glorifying New England, served as Plymouth’s governor for three terms, and favored the annexation of Pawtuxet as a United Colonies commissioner. Invariably, he had much more political clout with the CFP than that wielded by Weld. Having already returned to England three times, he had even been jailed by Laud for five months in 1635, which only increased his stature before the CFP as a godly ambassador. But when Winslow arrived in London in 1646, he found that Gorton had already put his own case into print with his book Simplicity’s Defense against a Seven-Headed Policy. The title features Gorton’s ingenious inversion of the classical and biblical image of the many-headed beast, traditionally used as an icon of evil and the anarchic monstrosity of the commonality. Winslow shortly responded with his own pamphlet, Hypocrisy Unmasked, to discredit Gorton and his Narragansett allies. Trotting out the old militant Protestant whipping boy, the Society of Jesus, Winslow claimed that the Gortonists “excel the Jesuits in the art of equivocation.” “What greater wrong can be done a poor persecuted people that went into the wilderness to avoid the tyrannical government,” he asked, “than to be accounted persecutors of Christ in his saints?” Like Winthrop, Winslow proved adept at equivocation, stating, “We did not meddle with them for their opinions . . . for we wrote them about civil controversies only.” In

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truth, the government of Massachusetts had publicly justified the invasion of Shawomet to staunch the flow of alleged blasphemy from the settlement. Far from aggressors themselves, Winslow painted the Bay and United Colonies in general as innocent victims of an antinomian/Narragansett plot that Miantanomi had hatched through “witchcraft.” Defending Massachusetts’s claim to Narragansett country, Winslow warned that “if the Gortonians be suffered to live so near them, it will be our ruin or these Indians.” In other words, Massachusetts should become the overlord of the Narragansetts for their own good, to prevent them from being deluded by sorcerers and seditionists such as Miantanomi and Gorton. With the help of the CFP, Massachusetts might deliver on the promise of its official government seal, which depicted a New England Indian pleading with the English to “Come Over and Help Us.”50 In the end, Weld’s and Winslow’s approach failed to terrify the CFP with the specter of antinomian sedition and native savagery, as both Williams and Gorton proved successful in receiving parliamentary charters, respectively, for Shawomet and the now conjoined governments of Providence and Rhode Island proper. For antinomian colonists, Henry Vane accomplished as a member of the CFP what he could not as the governor of Massachusetts, that is, the subordination of the colonial magisterial prerogative to English law, at least in the Narragansett region. He did so, moreover, just as the circulation of experience from the colonies began informing the conflicted quest for reformation in England that would shape the politics of the godly for the remainder of the Revolution. The transatlantic connections forged here were strikingly radical, as the Rhode Islanders, through the auspices of Parliament, secured religiously tolerant, democratic commonwealths in New England by elevating the civil sovereignty of Indians above the interests of another godly colony.51 Additionally, Vane, a friend and spiritual disciple of Anne Hutchinson, must have been profoundly moved by Gorton’s account of Hutchinson’s murder in Simplicity’s Defense, for which Gorton had held the Bay Colony accountable. Gorton’s narrative of his own trial in Massachusetts would only have reinforced Vane’s hostility to the magisterial prerogative, as the political slavery it bred in New England had actually culminated in the physical bondage of antinomians. Ultimately, Vane and other members of the CFP such as the earl of Warwick had no wish to see colonial courts ruling as laws unto themselves, a clear tyrannical impediment to the transatlantic progress of the Protestant Reformation as well as a seditious challenge to Parliament’s self-perceived sovereignty in the colonies.52 In Simplicity’s Defense, Gorton built his argument around the CFP’s desire

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to preserve the rule of law in the colonies. He contrasted Massachusetts’s sorry civil record with the superior one offered by the Narragansetts, who had declared their eagerness to be “ruled and governed according to the ancient and honorable laws and customs, established in that so renowned realm and kingdom of Old England.” Adroitly exploiting a humanist trope familiar to the colonialists on the CFP, Gorton linked the progress of English Protestantism in the Atlantic with the raising of new commonwealths on the foundation of peaceable relations with Native Americans. The selfjustification for English colonization here operated as an implicit antitype to the Black Legend. The CFP did not look kindly on wanton settler violence against the Indians, as it upset the entire image of the Protestant Pax Anglia that the English promoted to portray their colonial efforts as an enlightened alternative to Spain’s blood-drenched example. Gorton accordingly manipulated the Narragansetts’ submission to appease an audience who wished to see England’s authority reigning in peaceful supremacy over its Atlantic colonies, where both colonists and natives could expect justice from English law. Although Winslow tried to depict the Massachusetts government as the Narragansetts’ real benefactor, he enjoyed little success, as the colony’s aggression toward this Indian society seemed to presage a gruesome reprise of the Pequot War. For their part, of course, the Narragansetts would have preferred to be complete masters of their own political destiny. They submitted to the English government, via their engagement with the Gortonists, out of political desperation, although they did genuinely welcome their European neighbors as peaceable and plain-dealing allies.53 A year after the publication of Simplicity’s Defense, Gorton accepted a transatlantic request of some sympathetic Bay Colonists for a commentary on Psalm 110:6: “He shall judge among the heathen, he shall fill the places with the dead bodies; he shall wound the heads over many countries.” Gorton responded with a warning against reading a providential sanction for anti-Indian violence into the passage, writing that “by nature we are all alike” and that God, “by leading you through heathenish nations . . . thereby instructs in the things of this world . . . for there are so many kinds of voices in this world, and none is without its proper signification.” In giving the Narragansetts a “voice” in the settlement of an intercolonial dispute in an English court, Gorton honored their “proper signification” as human beings who could help the saints find the path in the American “wilderness” that led to the New Jerusalem. Blending diplomatic skill with radical conviction in Revolutionary London, Gorton promoted Native Americans from objects of mere evangelization to civilized subjects with sovereign liberties and privileges.54

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While Samuel Gorton emphasized the civility of the Narragansetts through their adherence to English law, Roger Williams drew a lyrical portrait of the Indians’ civility by dint of their inherent humanity. Williams did so, moreover, by playing to the intellectual heritage of the councilors on the CFP. In A Key into the Language of America, Williams translated the Narragansett language into English using the methods of the linguist Comenius, whose English adherents, as Christopher Hill noted long ago, resembled “very nearly a list of the Providence Island Company. It is a list of the leaders of the opposition in the Long Parliament,” the very faction that now dominated the CFP. As the literary historian Jonathan Beecher Field’s insightful treatment of A Key demonstrates, Williams adapted his linguistic masterwork to the intellectual tastes of his powerful audience on the CFP to highlight the Bay Colony’s hypocritical pretenses regarding Indian evangelization, its chief purpose, ostensibly, for planting Massachusetts.55 But beyond the intellectual savvy Williams displayed in A Key and the diplomatic success it engendered, the work’s real triumph lay in its profound deconstruction of the emergent colonial racial hierarchy. Williams wrote in the tract that “Nature knows no difference between Europe and Americans in blood, birth, bodies . . . God having of one blood made all mankind.” By highlighting both the natural equality and common humanity of settler and native, he further articulated the natural philosophy behind his original opposition to the Bay Colony patent, arguing that “barbarians” could not be placed in political or economic bondage by virtue of their strangeness from Christianity and European civilization. Williams explained this philosophy through poetry, writing in A Key: Boast not proud English, of thy birth & blood, Thy brother Indian is by birth as Good. Of one blood God made Him and Thee & All, As wise, as fair, as strong, as personal.

Indeed, Williams turned Eurocentric pretensions to civility on their head, writing from his experience with the Indians that “a man shall never hear of such crimes amongst them of robberies, murders, adulteries . . . as amongst the English.” 56 Importantly, Williams never romanticized a “noble savage” image of the Indians. The language of savagery permeated his writings: Indians could be “barbarous men of blood, who are as justly to be repelled as and subdued as wolves that assault sheep.” But in his work he never used the less savory things he observed among the Indians to ascribe inherent virtue to

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the English; indeed, far from framing Indians as a demonized “other,” he discovered the “savor of civility” in America’s so-called savages. Williams and other radicals urged their opponents in America and Revolutionary England to turn the Atlantic world of civility and savagery upside down by taking instruction from Indians beyond the seas. In A Key, drawing on a humanist trope developed in the sixteenth century by the humanist Michel de Montaigne, Williams italicized barbarian and Christian in ironic fashion to drive home the point that Christians could reap spiritual wisdom from the actions of those they had dismissed as heathens. Sometime in 1646, Williams’s fellow radical William Walwyn, then emerging as a leader of the Levellers, recalled “discoursing, from one thing to another” in his Coleman Street home with a friend from John Goodwin’s church, Richard Price. The two had repaired to Walwyn’s house shortly after leaving an Independent church in disgust, repelled by the preacher’s legalism. The conversation turned to the wisdom of the heathen, how wise and able they were in those things, unto which their knowledge did extend and what pains they took to make men wise, virtuous, and good commonwealths men; how pertinent they were in the things they undertook, to the shame of such Christians, as took upon them to be teachers of others. I say . . . go to the . . . innocent cannibals, ye Independent churches, to learn civility, humanity, simplicity of heart; yea, charity and Christianity.

Although Walwyn’s thought here was influenced by Montaigne, he might also have been swayed by Gorton’s and Williams’s well-publicized work with Native Americans, for Walwyn upheld the wisdom of American Indians in conjunction with his condemnation of the magisterial New England Way and its influence on England’s Independent clergy. Other Coleman Street radicals might also have learned from the work of the New England radicals, or perhaps from direct and personal encounters with Williams or Gorton. Indeed, Henry Denne, who had listened to Gorton preach in Thomas Lambe’s Coleman Street congregation, proclaimed in his own sermon that the “heathen must all be saved, because their sins . . . were pardoned,” as they “had Christ and the gospel preached to them in their creatures, the sun, the moon, and the stars . . . in them was revealed the knowledge of Christ crucified.” Perhaps due to the direct influence of Williams and Gorton, Walwyn and Denne, both future Levellers, urged the godly builders of the English commonwealth to keep looking across the Atlantic for inspiration, pointing to America’s Indians as sources of wisdom for the “honest

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party” as it engaged in internal debates about the true course of reformation in England.57 Whether or not A Key directly influenced Leveller thought, Williams had undoubtedly produced a piece of revolutionary transatlantic scholarship that drew upon humanist tropes to link the progress of the English Reformation, via the English Revolution, to the fate of the Indians in colonial America. But Williams did more than merely “refashion” older “discourses” from Renaissance “texts” within new colonial “contexts.” Inspired by the work he actually did with Indians in America as opposed to just reading about them in Europe, Williams cast New England’s original settlers as active agents of change who could work with the English to build a peaceable kingdom in the colonies. His labors among the Narragansetts offered Williams further proof that truth unfolds through experience; relying merely on the letter of the law and human learning left God’s children lost, wandering in the shadow lands, when the wisdom of the Spirit could bring them into the light. In A Key Williams depicted the English and the Indians as traveling together through a physical and spiritual wilderness in America, where each aspired to virtue in the face of their common human weaknesses. In an inhospitable natural environment the English and Indians could thrive best by recognizing each other as natural equals, turning to each other for support instead of trying to annihilate each other in battle. Support could come materially through mutual hospitality and the sharing of the necessities of life, such as when the Narragansetts succored many colonists who became lost in the woods, or when Williams lent Miantanomi his own canoe and fed his warriors during negotiations with the United Colonies. But perhaps more crucially, support could also come in spiritual forms. Colonists were not just physically lost in the woods, and Indians stood in need of more than just earthly furnishings.58 In America, colonists and Indians could find their way in the wilderness of life by guiding one another and bearing each other’s burden according to the best practices of Christian and Indian spirituality. The English translation code in A Key, read vertically, bears this out in poignant and poetic fashion. You will lose your way . . . I will go before. I will stay for you . . . I will follow you . . . I will carry you. You are heavy.

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You are light. Rise. Go. Run. Meet him . . . I am weary. I am lame . . . I will not leave you. Do not leave me . . . A staff. Use this staff . . . Lay down your burden.

Rather than the self-impressed monologues puritans wrote concerning their mission to the Indians, a dialogue between puritans and Indians provided the key to understanding the language of America and the part its colonization played in prophetic time. Williams thus gave Native Americans a full voice in the apocalyptic drama of salvation and a place by proxy at the political bargaining table. In this way, he could argue that subjecting Indians to forced conversion through the terrors of legalistic preaching, or worse, bloody conquest, could only impede the progress of reform in Old England and around the English Atlantic. Justified by human learning and their idolization of a false covenant, colonists kept their application of practical Christianity within the cultural confines of their own communities. Williams wanted to tear down these walls, to expose what other Christians saw as the onward march of civilization as the work of Antichrist, which demonized “savages” in New England, in Africa, and around the entirety of the English Atlantic in order to ready these human beings for exploitation, expropriation, and subjugation. For Williams, obtaining the kingdom of God on earth did not depend on a church covenant between colonists and God which excluded the mass of humanity. Instead, the millennium could be brought about by keeping the covenant of Christ himself, who fulfilled the moral law in his commandment to love one another, without respect of persons, in God’s unconditional fashion, as opposed to the conventions of human invention.59 Although the print culture of Revolutionary England allowed Williams to reach a larger audience than he would have otherwise, the success of his mission in Old England derived principally from his strenuous labor in America, where he strove to build a religiously tolerant, democratic colonial commonwealth founded upon the common humanity and civil sovereignty

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of colonists and Native Americans. My interpretation here draws directly on the CFP’s view of Williams’s efforts; in a letter granting him safe passage through the Bay Colony, the CFP explained that Williams’s “great industry and travail in his printed Indian labours, the like whereof we have not seen extant from any other part of America,” had “convinced both houses of Parliament to grant unto him and his friends with him a free and absolute charter of civil government for those parts of his abode.” Note that the CFP seemed most pleased with the “great industry and travail” that lay behind the “printed labors” of A Key, and not the linguistic devices that marked his tract. Human labor, not humanist texts, served as the source of Williams’s greatest intellectual achievement. The patent also recognized the political work Williams and the Rhode Islanders had undertaken within their own community and with the Indians. The CFP glowingly related how the “industrious inhabitants of the towns of Providence, Portsmouth and Newport” had compacted “a society with that great body of Narragansetts” to “lay a surer foundation of happiness to all America.” Thus, by granting Rhode Islanders “a free charter of civil incorporation and Government,” the CFP rewarded the labors of colonists who had constructed a religiously tolerant colonial commonwealth committed to recognizing both English law and Indian sovereignty; the CFP also disowned thereby the ambitions of another colonial commonwealth, Massachusetts, which in violation of English law would use violence to subject both colonists and Indians to its own arbitrary dominion.60 Wh i l e religious conflict marred every colonial region in the English Atlantic at the outset of the Revolution, only in New England did efforts toward religious reform, combined with long-standing concerns about the magisterial prerogative, spark constitutional revolutions among the godly as they went about their reformation work. Outrunning the pace of political change set by the “honest party” in England, settlers in Connecticut and Rhode Island established republican governments (not states) to preserve the people’s political and spiritual sovereignty in a reformed commonwealth. While Radical Reformation hostility toward prerogative government in church and state conditioned these constitutional controversies in both colonies, in Connecticut, Thomas Hooker saw to it that magistrates would still hold the power to suppress religious dissent. Although the settlers of the Connecticut River Valley freed themselves from a future of political slavery in Massachusetts, Connecticut freedom, as guaranteed in the Treaty of Hartford, meant Pequot slavery in political and economic terms.

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Rhode Islanders, in contrast, forging peaceable relations and a transatlantic political alliance with their Narragansett neighbors, moved rapidly to create an explicit “democracy” that embraced religious toleration as the most fundamental of all civil liberties. In Massachusetts a concerted campaign arose in the 1630s and 1640s to create a more popularly accountable republican form of government that took aim at the prerogative powers claimed by the Court of Assistants (the magistrates), the Standing Council, and the governor. The campaign partially succeeded through the passage of the Body of Liberties but left the magistrates and the Standing Council with considerable discretionary power. Most Massachusetts magistrates aspired to the republican ideal of a popular free state but disowned the republican forms of popular government favored by their political opponents. Meanwhile in New Haven, the colony completely reversed the trend toward popular accountability taken by reformers in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, adopting the Mosaic Code and its extremist variant of the magisterial prerogative. It should be remembered, however, that the architects of constitutional revolution in New England, like their peers in Old England, designed their commonwealths as millennial agents of reformation and not as political ends in and of themselves. But while political reform took a variety of courses in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Haven, these three colonies in conjunction with Plymouth combined to form the United Colonies. Moving first against Miantanomi, the engineer of a broad anticolonist Native American alliance, and then against the antinomians and Indians of the Narragansett Bay, the United Colonies, led by Massachusetts, eventually forced New England’s troubles into Old England just as revolutionaries there settled into a protracted debate over whether the Presbyterian model or the New England Way would best suit the reformed English Church. In London, both Roger Williams and Samuel Gorton, despite the best efforts of New England’s and Old England’s most talented heresiographers, convinced the Committee for Foreign Plantations, headed by Henry Vane and the earl of Warwick, that the Bay Colony’s persecution of antinomians and Indians had stalled reformation on the American strand. In this way, colonial emissaries in Revolutionary London made the Parliament-sanctioned founding of a democratic commonwealth contingent upon a concept of liberty of conscience that encompassed the civil and spiritual sovereignty of Native Americans and colonists alike. Coleman Streeters played instrumental parts in this transatlantic history. Theophilus Eaton and Edward Hopkins, alongside their old pastor John

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Davenport and the famous divine Thomas Hooker, dominated the colonial leadership on New England’s western frontier. In Massachusetts, Richard Saltonstall became a leader of the popular opposition to the Bay Colony magistracy and an exponent of republican structures of colonial government. In ways similar to the revolutionaries in England, he attempted to make the war-making powers of the state accountable to the people by investing it in their elected representatives. As we will see in the next chapter, heresiographers, taking note of the radical community that gathered in Coleman Street Ward, would make the neighborhood a transatlantic metaphor for antinomian heresy and democratic sedition; as for the radicals who hailed from around the English Atlantic, Coleman Street Ward would become ground zero in the revolutionary effort to emancipate the English Commonwealth from antichristian tyranny.

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“An Arrow against All Tyrants” Popular Republicanism and the English Revolution

on nov e m b e r 15, 1647, near the village of Ware in Hertfordshire, Wentworth Day gripped the staff of his company standard and peered across Corkbush field at Generals Oliver Cromwell and Thomas Fairfax, the two most powerful officers of the New Model Army. Although Day had begun his military career across the Atlantic in the Boston militia, he now rode in the regiment of horse commanded by Col. Thomas Harrison, a millenarian extremist. A “cornet,” or flag-bearer, Day served in Harrison’s regiment beside two other officers who had trained in the Boston militia, Major Stephen Winthrop, son of the Bay Colony governor John Winthrop, and the Leveller Major William Rainsborough. The New Englanders and their comrades had defied their generals and rendezvoused that November day in support of the republican constitution, An Agreement of the People, which the army command had in large part rejected. Rainsborough’s brother Thomas, a colonel in the New Model infantry, had passionately defended the Agreement not long before in an army debate at Putney, a London suburb, in a scene that still figures today as one of the most dramatic in English history. When General Cromwell first arrived at Corkbush Field and found himself facing a brewing mutiny, he demanded an explanation from Colonel Rainsborough, who handed Cromwell a copy of the soldiers’ constitution. As Cromwell and Rainsborough stood face to face at the moment of confrontation, Wentworth Day stood fast with the colors alongside his fellow soldiers. The tension of conflicted loyalties must have been close to unbearable for the troops. On one hand, they wanted to preserve army unity, to honor their solidarity, sacrifices, and hard-won victories under the command of 163

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Generals Fairfax and Cromwell. Both generals had fought bravely beside their men in battle and had sustained multiple wounds over the course of the war; having bled for the cause for which they all had labored, the generals were admired for their valor by the soldiers they commanded. But at the same time, Day and his comrades wanted to set the political terms by which their service would be honored, to verify to their officers and the nation that they were free men, not servile subjects at the beck and call of kings, parliaments, and generals. From the vantage point of the mutineers, poor commoners were being deprived of citizenship in the very commonwealth they had fought to bring into being.1 This chapter follows former colonists back to England during the Revolution, to trace the rise of popular republicanism in the press, the army, and the gathered churches, three institutions that were connected by an organizational nerve center that ran straight through Coleman Street Ward, London. While Richard Overton’s underground Coleman Street press continued to publish radical tracts that helped define the Leveller cause, the ward’s Independent congregations, including some led by colonists living in London, continued to attract a growing and increasingly politicized membership. The more radical churches in the ward commissioned evangelistic missions to the provinces and the New Model Army, where many of their members served. Fearing a Presbyterian settlement to the war, Coleman Street Ward’s gathered congregations spread a politicized gospel to rally the saints in the army and around the country to the cause of “liberty of conscience” in a “free state.” Their efforts in this regard did much to provide the popular base of support for an English republican movement organized by men and women who would come to be called “Levellers.” My approach here departs in important ways from some of the best work on English republicanism. Explaining the phenomenon as a political discourse within the context of a postregicidal crisis in national governance, historians have shown how republicanism supplied the new revolutionary regime with an array of complementary political languages and a set of commonwealth principles that also, importantly, provided a blueprint for the political architecture of a just and durable government. Concentrating on the Interregnum period, they have traced the rise of English republicanism through a linguistic map of historically layered political thought; here the meaning of political terms can never be taken for granted, as they vary according to different historical contexts and even diachronically from text to text. But the focus on the languages of liberty, as interesting and illuminating as it has been, has disembodied republicanism from the most impor-

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tant contexts informing political thought, lived experience, and not just that of famous writers. The experiences of tens of thousands of poor and middling commoners, processed through diverse intellectual inheritances that ranged from scripture to the Norman Yoke, found the political principles of a “republic,” a government purged of prerogative institutions, worth working, fighting, and dying for—all well before the execution of the king. This chapter will try to reembody the Revolution’s history of ideas by discussing how the popular republicanism of the Leveller movement, expressed by both soldiers and civilians, arose through a praxis between their practical Christian convictions, the Levellers’ most important intellectual resource, and their lived experience with war, destitution, and revolution.2 B e t w e e n 1643 and 1646, perhaps no other MP did more to set Revolutionary England’s military and political agenda than Sir Henry Vane. In 1643, Vane’s skillful if not cunning negotiations led to a timely military alliance with the Scots, the Solemn League and Covenant, which promised ostensibly to unite England and Scotland under a single Presbyterian church way. Although the antinomian Vane, to the dismay of the Scots, later succeeded in equating the cause of Parliament with toleration, he could not have done so had not his able ally in the House of Commons, Oliver Cromwell, proved such a capable commander on the field of battle. As one contemporary noted, “What Cromwell was to the army, Vane was to Parliament.” Vane and Cromwell had in fact developed a close friendship during the war, going so far as to call each other by nicknames, Vane answering to “Brother Herron” and Cromwell to “Brother Fountain.” Beyond their personal affection for one another, their generous conception of liberty of conscience made them comrades in the common cause of Protestant toleration.3 Although Vane failed to gain a decisive victory for toleration in Parliament during the mid-1640s, he helped shift the battleground for religious liberty to the army itself, which ultimately became the most potent and organized instrument of Radical Reformation in the English Revolution. With the assistance of Oliver Cromwell and Coleman Street MP Isaac Pennington, Vane led Parliament’s “war party” to its most important political triumph in the Revolution, the creation of the New Model Army. With Pennington organizing financial and political support in the City, the former Bay Colony governor pushed the New Model and Self-Denying ordinances through Parliament between December 1644 and April 1645. The ordinances reorganized Parliament’s forces into one national army under General Thomas Fairfax, purged incompetent officers from the ranks, and removed sitting

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MPs too friendly to the king from their military commands. Largely sympathetic to widespread Protestant toleration, the reformed officer corps led the New Model to victory in nearly every major battle it fought, victories that in turn brightened Protestant toleration’s political fortunes in Parliament.4 Other former colonists besides Vane made the army instrumental in advancing Radical Reformation tenets. The Dorchester, Massachusetts, settler Israel Stoughton, a Pequot War veteran and a foe of prerogative government in the Bay Colony, returned to Old England and joined the regiment of Thomas Rainsborough. Twelve of Stoughton’s fellow Bay Colonists from the Boston militia also ended up fighting in parliamentary armies, including the New Englanders mentioned in the introduction to this chapter. Throughout the book we will meet many other former colonists who followed suit, including Hanserd Knollys, John Wheelwright’s former disciple and a onetime supporter of Anne Hutchinson. Knollys signed up in 1643 as a chaplain in the Eastern Association army led by the earl of Manchester. “Preaching freely to the common soldiers,” as he later wrote in his autobiography, Knollys grew increasingly disgusted with Manchester’s aristocratic elitism and lukewarm reformism. Although as one of his enemies noted, Knollys “would not be suffered” for his antinomianism “in New England,” he had been allowed to do “a great deal of mischief in the army.” Perhaps the minister came to know another notorious mischief-maker in Manchester’s army, Captain (and later Lieutenant Colonel) John Lilburne, who, like Knollys, was said to distribute literature exhorting the troops to support Protestant toleration. Taking the fight back to London, Knollys persisted in his leveling militancy, preaching a revolutionary gospel of spiritual regeneration linked to political revolution, urging his flocks to “put off the old man, with his deeds, and . . . put on the new man, in which state of regeneration . . . we are made particulars of divine nature.” Brought out from “under the law which Christ redeemed,” Knollys had brought Anne Hutchinson’s antinomian testimony of the “new creature” back to England. There, with “armed men” at his side, probably soldiers, he took over churches, raised “tumultuous seditions” in a “factious way,” sparked “riots” that got him stoned out of the pulpit, preached to London crowds that eyewitnesses said numbered over “one thousand,” and broke down the walls in a house in Finsbury Fields to make way for the multitudes who flocked to hear his exhortations. For Knollys, the leveling work of revolution often took on a physical form.5 In the mid- to late 1640s, however, no New Englander worked harder inside the army to promote liberty of conscience than Hugh Peter, chaplain,

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political operative, and onetime minister to the church at Salem. Judging by Peter’s own testimony, it seems that the soldiers inspired Hutchinson’s former inquisitor to accept what he had rejected in New England, that magistrates had no right to meddle in religious matters. Only Peter himself really knew whether political opportunism in the army had changed his tune or revelation through revolutionary experience had changed his heart. But if expenditure of energy can provide any measure of his real feelings, Peter undoubtedly threw his whole soul into making Protestant toleration and the defeat of Presbyterian accommodation with the king the new raison d’être for the war. Responding to a November 1645 Presbyterian petition that blasted religious toleration and defended the king against his Independent enemies, Peters asked his listeners at St. Magnus church, whether they wished to bring themselves “back into bondage” by allowing the Presbyterians to dominate the political life of London. To counter the Presbyterian campaign, Peter joined forces with John Lilburne at the Nag’s Head tavern in Coleman Street to organize an “anti-petition,” “which was carried up and down the city . . . to get hands to it.” Speaking before the House of Commons after the New Model’s victory at Dartmouth, Peter warned that “if ever this Kingdom be brought into slavery” it would be at the hands of London’s powerful Presbyterian merchants, who had squeezed Isaac Pennington and his Coleman Street allies out of power in the City in 1645. A year later, after trying to smear Peter as a New England heretic, the Presbyterian Thomas Edwards complained that the former colonist “must be sent for whenever the Independents or some other sectaries” in London or the army were “about any great design or business.” Here, Edwards used Peter to personify the Presbyterian fear that the errant reformation in America had the potential to disrupt England’s own course of reform should the Independents prevail. After reading about himself in Edwards’s notorious work, Peter collared him at Westminster and addressed the Presbyterian stalwart as “a knave and stinking fellow,” printed euphemisms for the coarser epithets Peter surely used. The minister then threatened to punch Edwards out on the spot, causing the latter to scuttle away to chronicle the incident. Unsurprisingly, he cast Peter as an uncouth, brutish fanatic fresh from America. Reading about his profane fist-waving in the face of such a prude, however, would only have endeared Peter to the rough-hewn crowd of Londoners who had gathered with him at the Nag’s Head.6 Although Hugh Peter became a New Model luminary, soldiers of humbler status expressed their political views in the same blunt and fiery style favored by the reverend. Peter’s fellow chaplain, the comparatively stoic

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Richard Baxter, recalled that the soldiers’ “most frequent and vehement disputes were for liberty of conscience, as they called it . . . that the civil magistrate hath nothing to do but with civil things.” In contrast to Baxter’s disapproving but even-toned account of the soldiers’ religious convictions, Thomas Edwards lost whatever balance he possessed when it came to this controversial topic. In tones reminiscent of John Winthrop’s account of Anne Hutchinson and the New England antinomians, Edwards virtually shouted from the printed page that the “monster of toleration . . . conceived in the womb of the sectaries” had bred “strange monsters” in the army, where “errors” met “in the “same persons . . . having their heads of enthusiasm, their bodies of antinomianism, their thighs of Familism, their legs and feet of Anabaptism, their hands of Arminianism and libertinism as the great vein going through the whole.”7 It should be noted, as Edwards and Baxter did elsewhere, that while radical sectarians did not numerically dominate the New Model, they did become its most politically assertive constituency. According to Baxter, the soldiers’ most effective political leaders had embarked upon their political educations well before they had even entered the ranks of the army. Many had been “hatched up among the old Separatists” who gathered in neighborhoods like Coleman Street Ward to “study and . . . to rail against ministers and parish churches, and Presbyterians.” Others bore the imprint of experiences in New England. Beyond what they learned in conventicles and gathered churches around the English Atlantic, many soldiers had received a hands-on political education in the petitioning campaigns and mass demonstrations surrounding the parliamentary “engagements” of 1640–42. Like John Lilburne in 1642, many entered the army already politicized, but their experience as soldiers would intensify and in many cases radicalize their political views. Lilburne wrote one of the Revolution’s most famous political tracts, England’s Birthright Justified, in the summer of 1645, shortly after leaving the army. In the pamphlet Lilburne argued against monarchical and parliamentary prerogatives and in favor of religious toleration and popularly accountable government, writing that the soldiers had “their own native freedoms and birthrights not only to choose new members where they are wanting once a year but also to reign and inquire once a year after the behavior and carriage of those they have chosen.” Lilburne’s vision of more popularly accountable forms of government in England had already materialized in Rhode Island. Citing the laws of Edward the Confessor, Magna Carta, and the Petition of Right in support, Lilburne contended that such democratic scrutiny would work “for the good and preservation” of the

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English “Republic,” a prime example of how the Coleman Streeter made a career of defending constitutional innovation in the name of English political tradition.8 A royalist who described the New Model Army as “one Lilburne throughout” certainly overstated the radical’s influence among the soldiers, but it’s certainly true that the lieutenant colonel’s republican views were not rare within the ranks. For example, in 1646, Thomas Edwards reported that an unnamed colonel in the New Model Army declared that “if the whole commons and body of the people would agree and put down King and Parliament, overthrow the constitution of this Kingdom in Kings, Lords, and commons, they might do it.” A soldier in Northamptonshire explained that he and his comrades had “not fought so long for liberty . . . to be enslaved” by a Presbyterian settlement that would restore the king’s prerogative. Richard Baxter, who unlike Edwards lived among the soldiers as an army chaplain, thought that most of the troops took the king “for a tyrant and an enemy, and really intended absolutely to master him or ruin him . . . they said, what were the Lords of England but William the Conqueror’s colonels, or the Barons but his majors, or the knights but his captains?” The reference to the Conqueror signified the importance of the legend of the “Norman Yoke” in English popular politics, the notion that the people had been politically enslaved by the monarchy established at the Conquest.9 Religion as well as political tradition informed the militant views that many soldiers came to hold over the course of the civil wars. New Model veterans often found their way back to London’s revolutionary underground, moved by the electrifying current of radical religion and politics running through the City. For instance Paul Hobson, who combined preaching with fighting as a New Model Army captain, spoke before the troops at Newport Pagnell in April 1645, after which he suffered arrest at the hands of an abusive cadre of Presbyterian officers. Through the intervention of General Fairfax, Hobson soon went free and journeyed to the sectarian underground in Coleman Street Ward just in time to be swept up in the dragnet cast by the lord mayor over the “seditious” and “incendiary” conventicles in the City.10 But when the mayor handed Hobson over to Parliament’s Committee for Examinations, he received a reprieve. “The very next day,” the captain repaired to Samuel How’s old neighborhood in Moorfields. “Instead of [receiving] some exemplary punishment,” Hobson preached twice a week in Checker Alley, exhorting his listeners to accept the antinomian truth that “ye are risen above the law, and above the world.” Around the same time, the lord mayor, “having some information of mechanicks preaching in Cole-

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man Street,” targeted Thomas Lambe’s church in Bell Alley, where Lambe, Richard Overton, and Samuel Gorton had become infamous for helping to birth what Edwards called “that misshaped bastard monster toleration” into the world. The lord mayor endured another humiliating rebuff from Parliament, however, when the Committee for Examinations acquitted Lambe and anonymous accomplices from the church of any wrongdoing.11 T h e lord mayor soon gave up his efforts to crack down on lay preaching, but nothing seemed to stop Thomas Edwards, who cataloged 176 Independent “errors,” which in his view ranged from antinomian enthusiasm to democratic political tenets. At the same time, Edwards charted the histories and locations of Independent churches and conventicles, many of which he traced back to Coleman Street Ward and the former New Englanders who had gathered there. In his three-part magnum opus Gangreana, Edwards used the address and often the New England backgrounds of those who met there to fashion Coleman Street as a metaphorical entrepôt for the Atlantic-wide circulation of sectarian schism and political sedition.12 John Vicars titled his own vivid screed against Independency Coleman Street Conclave Visited (1648). Coleman Street’s radical reputation, however, cannot be reduced to an overwrought literary device manufactured in the fevered brains of paranoid Presbyterian writers. Although prone to wild fulminations about the dangerous potential of sectarian beliefs, this fiercely partisan set of writers did accurately identify the geographic locations of the “Independent” churches in the City, whether they lay in Coleman Street Ward or in other Independent hot spots across the Thames in Southwark or to the east in Spital or Stepney. But unlike other neighborhoods where the godly congregated, Coleman Street was portrayed in the Presbyterian propaganda campaign as the City’s impregnable Independent stronghold, fortified by its connections to the New England godly. The distinctive place the ward held in the godly community thus made it exceptionally vital to both the Independent cause writ large and the Presbyterian effort to destroy it. On Swann Alley off Coleman Street proper met William Carter’s and Henry Jessey’s churches, and although Jessey eventually succumbed to Hanserd Knolly’s Baptist evangelism, Jessey and the more doctrinally prudent Carter retained a cordial relationship, not least because they faced a common Presbyterian enemy at Westminster. Jessey, a veteran gatherer of churches who had seen the inside of the Wood Street Compter for conventicling, had borne witness with Samuel How to the breakup of Henry Jacob’s gathered church. Jessey therefore counseled patience with differences over the issue

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of adult baptism that arose within his congregation, cultivating godly solidarity as an ideal in its own right and as a practical measure in the face of formidable foes. Jessey also applied the same lessons in a transatlantic context. His long friendship and correspondence with the Winthrop family in New England included a 1645 letter to Governor Winthrop urging the Bay Colony to stop persecuting Baptists. Jessey had heard of the recent round of religious violence there from Thomas Patient and Thomas Tillam, who had returned from New England and joined in Hanserd Knollys’s efforts to gather Baptist churches on Coleman Street and elsewhere. Jessey would also have been kept abreast of Baptist persecution in America through letters he exchanged with Rhode Island’s John Clarke, who had started his own Baptist church with Samuel How’s old friend Mark Lucar in Rhode Island. At the same time, Jessey and his flock, like Clarke’s congregants in Rhode Island and those who met with Tillam, Patient, and Knollys in London, came to increasingly apocalyptic conclusions about their own revolutionary era. Reading the meaning of reformation through apocalyptic passages in the books of Daniel, Isaiah, and Revelation, these antinomians saw themselves as agents of redemption in the end of days, hastening the second coming of Christ, the prophesied millennial golden age when King Jesus would reign with his saints in what they called the Fifth Monarchy, the cosmic dynasty that would supplant the world’s four historical monarchies or empires.13 We have already met Captain Paul Hobson preaching in the army and in Moorfields. Between the critical years of 1645 and 1647, Hobson wrote three pamphlets on behalf of the Baptists who made up the bulk of the extreme Independent faction. In one of these, The Fallacy of Infant Baptism Discovered, Hobson argued that earthly authorities in church or state that assumed powers not directly granted by God committed sedition against “the Kingly Office of Christ.” Before Hobson gathered his own Baptist church around this time, he had belonged to the church of John Green. At the outset of the Revolution, Green caused a riot on Fleet Street with an antinomian sermon where he “instruct[ed]” the clergy on “how to preach the word, not the law nor legal preparation for the receiving of Christ.” Green fled to Trinidad after sparking the tumult on Fleet Street, although he returned to London around 1643 and joined Hanserd Knollys’ congregation, perhaps taking over his preaching duties while Knollys went off to serve in the army. Edwards eventually tracked Green to Coleman Street, “where there is a great resort and flocking to him, that yards, rooms, and houses are full, so that he causes his neighbors conventicles as Cretensis and others oft times to be very thin.” The man Edwards referred to as “Cretensis” was John Good-

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win, although in his haste to mock Goodwin by exaggerating Green’s sway, Edwards erred in charging that Goodwin had trouble filling his pews on Coleman Street.14 In the sometimes upside-down world of the Coleman Street conventicles and gathered churches, the leadership of women—as opposed to their mere presence—stirred the indignation of the heresiographers to no end, and they eagerly recounted as much as they could of the high profiles taken there by female citizen-saints. In the name of the reformation work to be done on behalf of the godly commonwealth, women gathered together in the ward “for some time” to preach “weekly on every Tuesday about four o’clock, unto whose preachings many have resorted.” As the Committee for Examinations discovered, this meeting took place in the home of a “Mrs. Attaway” who lived on Bell Alley, where she made lace to sell in a Cheapside stall. The other woman in question was a “major’s wife,” “a gentlewoman,” “living in the Old Bailey.” Both Attaway and the gentlewoman were General Baptists, convinced that Christ’s sacrifice had redeemed the entirety of humanity. In a detailed account of a service that Mrs. Attaway conducted on Bell Alley, Edwards recorded that she delivered a sermon on John 14:15: “If you love me, keep my commandments.” While preaching, Attaway recalled how God had chosen women as heralds and prophets to the godly in the apocalyptic days of reformation and revolution. “Now those days were come,” she intoned, when “that . . . which was spoken of in the scriptures” would be fulfilled, “that God would pour out his spirit on the handmaidens, that they should prophecy.” Unfortunately for the female ministers, scoffers had infiltrated the congregation; they had come for “the novelty” of hearing women preach the heresy of universal salvation. When the major’s wife took over from Attaway and declared herself an “ambassador” and “minister” of Christ, the intruders gave out an incredulous cry, “Ambassador! Minister! You an ambassador!” The mocking, jeering, and heckling grew so loud and insistent that Attaway, “with an angry bold countenance,” began praying for God’s judgment on “those who despised his ministers and ambassadors . . . sent into the world to reconcile the world.”15 Appealing to the sovereignty of their providential ordination to preach the word of godly liberty, Attaway and her colleagues asserted their right as women to instruct the saints on how the English must engage in the apocalyptic work of reformation. The message and its female messengers found welcome audiences in radical enclaves across the length and breadth of England. For example, the New Model Army chaplain and Leveller advocate John Saltmarsh preached alongside a woman in Brentford. Kather-

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ine Chidley, a Leveller herself, wrote revolutionary political and religious pamphlets, disputed publicly with puritan divines, and gathered her own church in the 1640s; in the early 1650s, she defended John Lilburne when most of the sectarians had deserted him. Thomas Lambe, another diehard defender of Lilburne, also welcomed Mrs. Attaway, “the mistress of all the she-preachers on Coleman Street,” to preach in his church. Henry Jessey wrote an account of Sarah Wight’s prophetic visions and described in detail how Wight comforted Dinah, a “blackamoor” from Bristol who had plunged into despair over her spiritual estate. Saltmarsh wrote the epistle to Jessey’s tract. Saltmarsh and Lambe’s friend and fellow traveler Samuel Gorton had followed Anne Hutchinson to Rhode Island and mourned her death before leaving again for Old England. While in London attending Lambe’s church, Gorton would have heard Mrs. Attaway preach; perhaps Gorton and Attaway preached together, maybe in Attaway’s own church just a few doors down on Bell Alley. According to Thomas Edwards, Gorton did indeed preach in the church of another female minister on Coleman Street, known to us now only as Sister Stagg. Hugh Peter, the former scourge of Gorton’s Rhode Island ally Anne Hutchinson, came full circle in Old England to inspire the political prophecies of Anna Trapnell, who worshiped in the Coleman Street congregation of Hutchinson’s old follower Hanserd Knollys, and ventured forth from London to Cornwall to prophesy to the faithful. The spiritists who had gathered in the ward from distant points around the English Atlantic seemed to welcome the ways in which women, as women, insisted that the voice of King Jesus be heard through their own; in this way, women invested themselves with a sovereignty that made them agents of what John Milton called “the approaching reformation.”16 The heresiographer Richard Elyman entertained a far less enthusiastic view than Milton’s of England’s Revolution and Radical Reformation, believing that the ensuing turmoil had impeded the progress of the kingdom of God on earth by loosening “the golden reins of government,” causing “sectaries” in exile to “flock” to London from their hideouts in Europe and America. The radicals had, Elyman wrote, “overrun . . . the whole Kingdom” when they returned from beyond the seas. Although he undoubtedly exaggerated the volume of this radical remigration, Elyman correctly observed that returned New Englanders such as Gorton, Williams, Knollys, and Patient did much to turn London, as Elyman himself put it, into another “Amsterdam,” a heresiographical code word for religious heterodoxy and toleration. In another Presbyterian tirade, the heresiographer Samuel Rutherford blamed How and Hutchinson as the sources for the revolution-

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ary antinomianism that Samuel Gorton had been spreading throughout England. Rutherford also viewed Gorton and his friend John Saltmarsh as the most dangerous antinomians in the English Atlantic entire.17 During his stay in London, Gorton took the grand tour of the City’s conventicles and gathered churches. He frequented the meetings led by Sister Stagg and others conducted by Edward Barber and Roger Beacon. But Gorton became most famous through his association with Thomas Lambe’s church in Bell Alley, which made him a target for Parliament’s Committee of Examinations. Lambe’s church deserved its reputation as one of the most religiously subversive, politically radical meetings in London, for in contrast to the Calvinism of most Independent congregations, its members came to accept general toleration, universal salvation, and democratic republicanism. The congregation ultimately gave the Levellers their most reliable base among the London gathered churches. Besides attracting printers and intellectuals like Richard Overton, “gentleman” merchants and colonists like Gorton, and lay-preaching tradesmen such as Samuel Oates, the church became a meeting place for the young working poor of the City’s radical underground, a demographic that imbued Lambe’s services with a raucous, unruly charisma that only enlivened its democratic ethos.18 Edward’s description of Lambe’s Bell Alley church captures the energy that enlivened its proceedings, the democratic workings of the congregation, and the central tenet that its members subscribed to: “Many used to resort to this church and meeting, the houses full, especially young youths and wenches flock hither, and all of them preach universal redemption. In their church meetings and exercises there is such a confusion and noise, as if it were at play, and some will be speaking here, some there.” There were “many exercisers” or preachers, sometimes two or three per meeting, while the congregation, as Edwards noted, voted for who should speak next. Oftentimes objections to the prophesying would come in the middle of an exercise, and the church would give over to debate before the speaker had finished. Unlike the ministers of many other gathered churches, Lambe, in keeping with his democratic sensibilities, kept his open to the general public. The sheer size of the meetings and the stir they created in the neighborhood attracted the attention of passersby. Edwards reported that a “gentleman going through Coleman Street . . . seeing a great store of people coming out of an alley, asked what the matter was; some told him they were sectaries come now from their conventicle.” Others made curious by Lambe’s church ended up in Bell Alley in search of amusement; some of them left in a hurry. Three such young men were so astonished by the unorthodox opinions “vented” by Lambe’s congregants that they im-

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mediately reported their observations to the Committee for Examinations. Others came looking for trouble—usually boys from the neighborhood whose noisemaking sparked fisticuffs on the street with church members. The scene in Bell Alley seems worthy of a Hogarth or a Rowlandson, but unfortunately seventeenth-century England did not produce an illustrator who shared even their condescending fascination with the public lives of the city’s commoners.19 When Gorton entered Lambe’s church, he joined a set of dedicated evangelicals bent on spreading their revolutionary gospel to the soldiers of the New Model Army and the people of England’s port cities, market towns, and villages. Gorton himself accompanied Lambe on his own mission to Norfolk and preached in the village of Lynn. Years later in a tract he dedicated to Saltmarsh, Gorton affectionately remembered the people of Lynn for their spiritual wisdom and the warm reception they afforded him. Lambe’s follower Henry Denne, a New Model Army trooper, visited Kent, Lincolnshire, and Cambridgeshire, where he baptized “according to his commission” from the Holy Spirit, preaching the gospel of “universal salvation,” that “Jesus Christ hath died for all,” “Turks” and “Pagans” too, and “that all the sins of men committed against the moral law were . . . forgiven and pardoned” when Christ died on the cross. Jeremiah Ives, a member of Lambe’s church and another member of the New Model cavalry, joined Lambe and Captain Henry Pretty on a tour of central England. In 1647, a bloody brawl ensued when Ives preached at Buckingham. Another soldier in Lambe’s church whom we have already met, the weaver Samuel Oates, seems to have had more success than Ives in keeping the peace and converting the Lord’s lost sheep, reportedly drawing “great flocks after him” in London and the provinces. In 1645 and 1646 Oates traveled, sometimes with Lambe, as an “emissary” of the church, visiting Surrey, Sussex, and Essex, meeting with both soldiers and civilians, converting many. The spiritual comfort of the gospel of universal salvation through free grace, not to mention its egalitarian overtones, may explain Oates’s wide following. His courage in the face of danger may offer another clue. In the village of Bocking in Essex in February 1645, a press gang invaded one of Oates’s assemblies. He stopped his sermon, confronted the soldiers, most probably with his own firearm, and speaking to them “disrespectfully, bade them to get to their steeple houses to hear their popish priests, their Baal priests.” Having prevented the men in his audience from being press-ganged into the army, Oates had put his own body on the line to secure his congregants’ bodily liberty as well as their liberty of conscience, a link between two forms of freedom that other radicals were making at the same time.20

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While traveling through Norfolk with other evangelists from Lambe’s London church, Gorton managed to publish An Incorruptible Key to the CX Psalm, a product of his transatlantic correspondence with Massachusetts colonists who preferred his preaching to John Cotton’s. Overton, who joined Gorton in Lambe’s church, probably published the pamphlet in his underground press, as the title page bears no mention of a printer or bookseller. Gorton probably first impressed his Massachusetts correspondents during his days of preaching while laboring in chains on the Charlestown public works. As we learned in chapter 4, a group of Bay Colonists had written the radical in London requesting his interpretation of Psalm 110, upon which Cotton had recently preached, but not to their satisfaction. Gorton’s glosses on the psalm are instructive about his religious and political beliefs, which he hardly compartmentalized, both as they had formed in New England and as they continued to form during his days in Coleman Street Ward’s antinomian underground.21 Verses 1 and 2 of Psalm 110 speak of God sending his people forth from Zion to make “footstools” of their enemies, in whose midst they would one day rule. Gorton made sense of this passage by proclaiming that “we are not terrified by our adversaries” in their “Babylonish conferences and courts” because “God is our salvation, and not the power and policy of the world.” Gorton read verse 4 of the psalm, which speaks to the power of the priesthood, as a justification for lay preaching, that God had made his entire people priests of the Word and Spirit, for “the ministry of the word” could not be “monopolized” by the clergy since any saint, blessed with “an equal share . . . in every particular grace of the gospel,” could be inspired to preach by the Spirit which spoke “itself freely without respect to persons.”22 By monopolizing the pulpit, Gorton argued, the clergy usurped “the prerogative royal of the son of God” and committed sedition against “King Christ.” Since “God was no respecter of persons,” as Gorton wrote, no human being could presume to keep others from enjoying their God-given liberties, in this case preaching. The Lord’s “princely power and authority springs only out of man’s weakness and insufficiency.” “Every soul” therefore must be made “subject to” the “supereminent power,” the “word or son of God,” whose sovereign “prerogative and privilege” reign “over and above all”; the clergy, argued Gorton, and not lay preachers, had refused this subjection. Even worse, by preventing the laity from entering the pulpit, the clergy had usurped the sovereignty that belongs to God alone. Here, Gorton’s break with convention inverted the traditional legalism of the clergy, who read the first table of the Ten Commandments and Romans 13:1 as

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God’s commandment to the mean and poor to subject themselves in their civil and spiritual lives to the authority of earthly superiors. Gorton, instead, leveled everyone before the Leviathan Christ, the only authority to which all owed obedience. God, in his view, had crowned the entire body of the people as a collective earthly kingship destined to destroy all forms of arbitrary, carnal authority, whether it be the king’s, the bishops,’ Parliament’s, the magistrates’, or the puritan clergy’s. The language he used to express this egalitarian sense of sovereignty reflected the martial republicanism and millennial expectations of the saints with whom he associated in the gathered churches on Coleman Street, many of whom were soldiers themselves. One passage on this score from An Incorruptible Key bears quoting at length: Such is the dignity and sovereignty of every person . . . that in the day of the Great Army . . . when all these Kingly warriors or priestly willing officers . . . are summoned together and brought into one subsistence, or being . . . there doth the power of this princely army make itself manifest, as in a day of muster . . . out of the unity that is in Christ . . . without any respect of persons at all, in any way of . . . preferring one before another, or debasing of any one, as lower than another, so that the whole glory and grace takes on every particular, and every particular the whole . . . in the Holy Army, that which is the power and glory of one, is the power and glory of all . . . that powerful army will bring down the walls of “Jericho.”

Gorton began writing An Incorruptible Key in New England, but the gap between his arrival in Old England (1645) and its publication (1647), coupled with the military language of leveling radicalism that pervades the book, suggests that he added much to the manuscript while living in London, inspired by his experiences with New Model Army soldiers and their civilian supporters on Coleman Street and elsewhere in England. Gorton’s ideological affinity and personal association with the Levellers of Lambe’s church, as well as his consequent influence in Old England, may be judged by the fact that Edward Winslow republished his rejoinder to Gorton’s Simplicity’s Defense under a new title, The Danger of Tolerating Levellers in a Civil State.23 Gorton’s mystical marching orders for “the holy army” revealed a common desire for solidarity among the saints, a vision made all the more desperate due to the mounting tensions within the Independent political coalition. While Baptist churches and their more staid gathered counterparts did battle, churches also imploded from within, as instanced by the hostilities that commenced during the 1640s in the Coleman Street parish

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of St. Stephen’s, London’s puritan citadel, when John Goodwin attempted to gather a church within the parish open to all saints within and without its boundaries. Afraid that newcomers would come to command the parish vestry, Isaac Pennington led a successful putsch that removed Goodwin from his position at St. Stephen’s. Although many preeminent parishioners stayed put, the split did not deprive Goodwin of influential supporters, for his gathered church, like the parish he left behind, justly earned its reputation as a redoubt for the rich and politically connected.24 It also proved to be a place for radical religious experimentation, including, ironically, the practice of lay preaching. Goodwin’s new departure prompted Thomas Edwards to point out that “if How the Cobbler were alive again, Cretensis [Edwards’s unflattering nickname for Goodwin] . . . would have no more disputation and difference about human learning necessary to the preaching of the word.” Edwards’s aim did not fall wide of the mark here, for in the midst of the Revolution the minister had come to accept what he could not at the height of the Laudian purges. Goodwin’s ever-evolving theological convictions, which eventually embraced something close to Arminian free will, also drew rigid Calvinist apostates to his side. Converts of this sort included the young Isaac Pennington Jr., a future Quaker, who joined Goodwin’s separated congregation much to the displeasure of his father. Across the Atlantic, a group of Bay Colonists even petitioned the General Court to prescribe Goodwin’s model as the New England church way.25 Goodwin’s religious innovations prompted his old friend John Vicars to call him a “busy brain,” a “sham of divinity,” and a “patron of heresy”— just one example of how Presbyterian polemicists fashioned Goodwin into a symbol of Independency’s tendencies toward enthusiasm, schism, and error. Another former ally, Edwards, crowned Goodwin with the inglorious title “the Great Red Dragon of Coleman Street” and went on to devote nearly forty pages in the second part of Gangreana to cataloging his many “errors.” For Edwards and company, Goodwin’s worst error lay in his support for complete religious toleration. Like Roger Williams, the Coleman Street pastor held that drawing the magisterial sword to compel religious conformity encouraged spiritual hypocrisy, restricted the revelation of new truths, and replaced Christian charity with tyranny. Goodwin’s notoriety as a champion of toleration can be judged by the fact that Presbyterians ranked his M.S. to A.S., along with Williams’s Bloody Tenet of Persecution and Richard Overton’s Arraignment of Mr. Persecution, as the most influential pro-toleration tracts then in circulation.26 These radicals, along with the redoubtable Samuel Gorton, led the push

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for complete toleration during the age of the English Revolution, drawing on their experiences from around the Atlantic world to call for the abolition of the magisterial prerogative in religious and civil matters. Their concept of Christian love and unity demanded such radical change. As William Walwyn wrote in The Power of Love, “there is no respect of persons with God, and whosoever is possessed with love, judgeth no longer as a man, but Godlike as a true Christian. . . . [A]re you of God’s family? No doubt you are; why God is love, and if you be one of God’s children, be not ashamed of your Father, nor his family . . . he bid you walk in love, as Christ loved you.” Radical practical Christianity of this sort refused to confine religious liberty to the “itchy and scabby children” of the Protestant family, as the Independent Francis Rous called the wayward saints who could still be countenanced by the self-defined orthodox. Conjoining their convictions in Christian equity with their republican conception of popular sovereignty, radicals from New and Old England living in London during the Revolution contended, even before the rise of the Leveller movement, that liberty of conscience was the fountain from which all civil liberties flowed in a free state. Since human beings could not exercise a power that God himself did not give, magistrates could not usurp the spiritual sovereignty of their fellow creatures, all of whom were made in the image of God. To limit liberty of conscience would pervert the mystical truth that all are born free and equal as God’s common creation, a truth that Rhode Islanders had already made a constitutional principle in their colonial commonwealth, and one that the Levellers would soon enshrine in their own constitutional program.27 T h e Leveller movement emerged in the summer of 1646 through a republican campaign for constitutional change that relied upon print, petitioning, and public meetings to mobilize mass support. In general, the movement strove to unite factions of tenuously allied Independents around a program of religious toleration, republican government, and social justice.28 For the previous two years, Presbyterians had knocked the Independents back on their political heels through relentless attacks on liberty of conscience, lay preaching, and unlicensed printing. Moreover, the Presbyterian drive for peace with the king’s party jeopardized the Independent churches’ future in postwar England. As for the Presbyterians themselves, they faced the many-headed hydra of antinomian heresy and sedition that extreme Independents like Lilburne, Overton, and Walwyn had helped whip up in the army and the gathered churches. By the late spring of 1646, the hostility between the two godly camps reached new heights of intensity, as both

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factions redoubled their efforts to create loyal constituencies through the crowd-mobilizing tactics pioneered during the more unified period of the 1640–42 constitutional revolution.29 The gathered churches that met in Coleman Street Ward served the mobilizing efforts of the incipient Leveller movement well, providing an organizational center for networks of extreme Independents in Southwark, the East End of London, the New Model Army, and provincial towns and villages.30 Independents gathered in City venues such as Salters’ Hall and a range of Coleman Street taverns which included the Windmill, the Whalebone, the Nag’s Head, and the Star. Attendees ranged from the welldressed merchants of Goodwin’s church to others from Lambe’s congregation garbed in the worsted wool of London’s working poor. Independent political convocations could attract crowds in excess of five hundred, with debates over principles and tactics creating a supercharged emotional atmosphere given the high stakes at hand, the perfection of the Reformation and the constitutional settlement of the church and state. The assembled had been well trained to deliberate such weighty issues through the democratic workings of the conventicles and gathered churches, which, as we know from Samuel How’s experience at the Nag’s Head, sometimes met in taverns as well. “Debating, counseling, prophesying” and “voting,” all proper for the Lord’s people, as the New Model chaplain John Saltmarsh reflected, dominated these gatherings, where a republican political program began emerging amidst clouds of pipe smoke, warm ale, and not a little hot air.31 At the same time, the bold and articulate charisma that enabled John Lilburne to move the revolutionary crowd in 1640–42 led to his emergence as the most commanding figure of the radical set that frequently met at the Windmill. Many of the humbler saints from the Coleman Street churches of former New Englanders such as Thomas Patient and Hanserd Knollys found their way to these meetings. More prominent figures included William Walwyn and, for a time, some well-placed, politically influential members of Goodwin’s church led by John Price. “Very good friends we were all,” wrote Walwyn, reflecting on this exciting period of ideological ferment and political organization. Edwards described Lilburne at this time as “the darling of the sectaries,” who displayed his “contempt for authority” as “a great stickler at The Windmill Tavern . . . drawing up petitions for Parliament.” Lilburne’s fellow martyr John Bastwick, whom Lilburne had comforted at the pillar in 1637, wrote that his old friend now “deluded” “crowds and multitudes” of “poor people” who attended his meetings with “false information.” William Prynne agreed with his fellow Presbyterian, warn-

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ing that Lilburne “kindled a public dangerous flame” at the public house, “disaffect[ing] diverse of his seditious faction, and set their tongues nay hearts against Parliament . . . ripening public mutinies.” When Lilburne landed in jail in August 1645 for such activities, Knollys had his congregation pray for his release, while other sympathizers raised a petition for the lieutenant colonel that gathered two thousand signatures, an early indication of the army veteran’s widening support and the increasingly politicized stance taken by the gathered churches. Walwyn stepped up the pressure on the Presbyterians with the October 1645 publication of England’s Lamentable Slavery, an attack on religious persecution and prerogative government in general. Overton, meanwhile, kept the underground press in working order, printing Lilburne’s letters from jail and his republican tract England’s Birthright Justified. Overton also used the covert press to print his own radical missive, England’s Misery and Remedy, and several editions of the antiPresbyterian satires known collectively as the Marprelate tracts over the fall and winter of 1645.32 The Presbyterians struck back through print and petitioning. Most famously, Thomas Edwards rolled out the first part of his three-volume masterwork Gangreana early in 1646. The alarm that Edwards and others raised about the specter of schism and sedition haunting England laid the groundwork for the “Humble Remonstrance,” a Presbyterian mass petition gathered in London urging crackdowns on Independent religious and political assemblies. That spring, Lilburne escalated the conflict by authoring his own attacks and distributing A Word in Season, Walywn’s reply to the “Humble Remonstrance,” at Westminster. Lilburne and Walwyn’s increasingly aggressive stance split the members of Goodwin’s church who had been meeting with them at the Windmill—the first sign of a fissure among the extreme Independents and one that would seriously weaken the Leveller program over the next four years. In June, the situation grew more desperate with Lilburne’s arrest for The Just Man’s Justification. At this point, Walwyn and Overton decided to take their case to the people in the form of a mass petitioning campaign based on their manifesto, The Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens, intending to beat the Presbyterians at their own game of mass mobilization. It is at this point in July 1646, with the circulation of the Remonstrance, that we can begin to speak of a programmatic Leveller movement, and hence the organization of a clearly republican political faction in the English Revolution.33 The Levellers managed to convince 98,064 people to sign the Remonstrance, a more than impressive organizational feat that also signaled wide-

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spread sympathy for the movement’s republican principles and agenda. Hardly confined to London, the petition circulated all over England, with signatures collected by soldiers, members of provincial churches, and traveling London evangelists from Lambe’s Coleman Street church and other gathered congregations. Published by Overton’s underground press, the litany of grievances and reforms listed in the Remonstrance outlined a Leveller platform the essential substance of which would change little over time. On the title page, next to a portrait of Lilburne behind bars, a declaration of republican principle proclaimed that English citizens were now “calling these their commissioners” in the Long Parliament “to an account . . . for how they have discharged their duties to the universality of the people, their sovereign lord.” In the text, the authors reminded the MPs that “we possessed you with the same power that was in ourselves . . . to deliver us from all kind of bondage and to preserve the commonwealth in peace and happiness.” Coming from the people as “a power of trust,” Parliament’s initiatives remained “ever revocable” should they fail to secure the public good and the people’s liberty. In a point-blank statement of republican popular sovereignty, the Remonstrance reminded the Long Parliament, “We are your principals, and you our agents,” and that it was “usurpation and . . . oppression” to “assume or exercise any power that is not derived from our trust and choice thereunto.” “But now” that their “agents” had “sat . . . four years longer than we intended . . . we both see and know” all the “stratagems” that the Presbyterians in Parliament had designed “to entrap and so to enslave” the people. Parliament had “engaged” the “generality of the people” in “a long, bloody and consuming war” that instead of emancipating them had further captivated them under a Presbyterian tyranny. “Multitudes of the highest impositions” or taxes had worked to the “decay of trade,” ensuring that the “expense of time and treasure” would keep “the supreme power” from “fall[ing] into the people’s hands,” all so that the Presbyterians could maintain “the King . . . [and] his lords and prelates” in all their “prerogatives” and “privileges.” “Have you shook this nation like an earthquake to produce no more than this for us?” demanded the petitioners with angry incredulity.34 Systemic political change had to be undertaken for England to complete the “root and branch” reformation work desired by these revolutionaries. “The continual oppressors of the nation have been kings,” the Remonstrance proclaimed, who “to make good their interests” brought the people “into a slavish subjection to their wills.” To explain this historically, Walwyn and Overton resorted to the popular political tradition of the “Norman Yoke.”

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“The history of our forefathers since they were conquered by the Normans does manifest that this nation has been held in bondage all along ever since.” According to the legend, however, freeborn Englishmen had never quit resisting the kingly bondage that the Norman invaders had imposed and their royal posterity had maintained. But the petitioners, looking beyond even this rich political inheritance, insisted that the laws of nature justified their demands for revolutionary change, insisting “that we are the men of the present age and ought to be absolutely free from all kinds of . . . arbitrary power . . . without exception or limitation either in respect of persons, officers, degrees, or things.” “Therefore,” in addition to the monarchy, reformers in the House of Commons “must also deal better with us concerning the Lords.” Much like the Coleman Street petitioners of March 1642, the Levellers argued that the House of Lords had no sovereign law-making power since it could not be held to popular account. Only the Commons, “chosen by us the people,” could “bind . . . the whole nation by making, altering, or abolishing of law.” For England to become a free state, the “negative voices” or veto power of Lords over Commons must be abolished, “or else,” the petitioners demanded, “tell us why it is reasonable we should be slaves?” Annual parliamentary elections would prevent future bodies from exercising the same “absolute power” that the Long Parliament had “over the consciences . . . persons and purses” of the people.35 The authors next addressed a set of grievances and reforms that extreme Independents in earlier tracts had discussed only in piecemeal fashion. Religious persecution came first, since “neither you [Parliament] nor none else can have any power at all to conclude the people in matters that concern the worship of God.” On the economic front, freemen should be freed from the tyranny of merchant monopolies, which arbitrarily restrained their commercial opportunities. Custom duties and excise taxes also came under attack, “insomuch as men of inferior trading,” a staple demographic in the gathered churches, found it “a very slavery to have anything to do with” the corrupt officials who collected the duties. The petitioners further protested that “the merchant establishment . . . abound[ing] in goods” had “no compassion” for the afflictions of the “many thousand . . . hunger-starved . . . persons and families.” Parliament’s new prerogative courts, reprising the tyranny of Star Chamber and High Commission, had made captives of political dissenters and the free press. Following Milton’s line in Areopagetica, the Remonstrance linked the freedom of the press to liberty of conscience, for if the press were not set “at liberty . . . all men’s understandings” could not be “conveniently informed and convinced as fair as is possible.”36

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From the freedom of the mind the Remonstrance moved on to the freedom of the body through a scorching condemnation of military conscription. Impressment, the authors argued, exploited the poor, turned tradesmen into beggars, and made freeborn Englishmen slaves to the state. Immediately following a section lambasting Parliament and the merchant elites for their callousness toward the poor, the Remonstrance reasoned: We entreat you to consider what difference there is between binding a man to an oar as a galley-slave in Turkey or Argiere, and pressing of men to serve in your war. To surprise a man on the sudden, force him from his calling where he lived comfortably from a good trade, from his dear parents, wife or children, against inclination and disposition to fight for a cause he understands not and in company of such as he has no comfort to be withal, for pay that will scarce give him sustenance—and if he live, to return to a lost trade, or beggary, or not much better: if any tyranny or cruelty exceed this, it must be worse than that of a Turkish galley-slave.

Anticipating the outcry over the shortage of troops that abolishing impressment would allegedly produce, Walwyn and Overton pointed out that a contemporary republic, the United Provinces, employed “no such cruelties, esteeming nothing more unjust or unreasonable; yet they want no men.”37 Overton’s likely sojourn among the Dutch would have educated him on this point concerning impressment. In England, few in power in Parliament or the king’s party relished the press gang and its clear contradictions to the traditions of English liberty; nonetheless, both sides filled their infantry ranks through conscription, considering it a “necessary evil” to secure the interests of state. On the other hand, the tens of thousands who subscribed to the Leveller Remonstrance saw impressment as both evil and unnecessary, as did many thousands of others who had actually fallen prey to the press gangs. If Parliament would follow the “good example” of the Dutch to “make this nation a state free from the oppression of kings and the corruptions of the court and show love to the people in the constitutions of your government, the affection of the people would satisfy all common and public occasions.” For the Levellers, freeing the country from the yoke of kingly antichristian tyranny could not come about by politically enslaving men to fight against their wills at the peril of their lives and the welfare of their families. Like all the essentials of the Leveller program it outlined, the antiimpressment clause in the Remonstrance was rooted in a revolutionary moral philosophy, one that combined natural law with Christian mysticism

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to radically reconstitute English humanist notions of the body politic and the public good.38 God, according to Overton, “created everyman free in Adam, so by nature all are like freemen born and . . . made free in grace by Christ,” which, in Lilburne’s words, rendered “all . . . alike in power, dignity, authority, and majesty.” As all dwelt in Christ as their common inheritance, so Christ dwelt commonly in all the “sons of Adam,” who had “legitimately derived a natural propriety” from their Savior and Creator, who had endowed them with an inalienable set of “just rights” that formed the “prerogative of mankind.” To preserve these “just rights,” God had blessed human beings with “right reason,” or the power of rational discernment. As Overton wrote, right reason or rational skepticism, far from being spiritually barren, was “only commensurable and discernible by the rule of merciful justice and just mercy.” This “power of love,” as Walwyn called it, was the “royal law” of Jesus, which fulfilled the moral law of the Old Testament by calling people to live out their redemption by loving one another unconditionally, just as God loved his creation, freely bearing each other’s burdens for the good of the whole. Overton asserted that, “no man is born for himself,” to maximize his own interests or those of his class, religion, or political persuasion at the expense of others; God created people in his image to give of themselves to others, to become, in effect, practical Christians. The “human learning” that tempered the practical Christian convictions of the elite around the English Atlantic called for the submission of the people to the consciences of godly magistrates; in contrast, the Levellers embraced a practical Christianity that made magistrates accountable to the consciences of the people, as guided by natural law, the Holy Spirit, and the Word of God. Since God’s love for his creation redeemed the whole world through the “gifts and graces” that flowed “radically” or fundamentally from the Holy Spirit, God could not be a “God of irrationality, and madness, or tyranny,” condemning some to hell and saving others for heaven. Likewise, God, as the source of all sovereign authority, would not consign most of humanity to political slavery while investing the world’s tyrants with a divine right to ride roughshod over his creation, as God would not grant human beings with powers that violated his very essence. To do otherwise would be irrational, as tyranny was “contrary” to the “nature” of God, who was, in essence, love.39 Reason, or love, then, called for human beings to practice the “royal law” of Christ, what the Levellers also described as “common equity,” in their day-to-day social and economic relationships. Consonant with the divine gift of natural liberty, those “that would do as you would be done unto” ac-

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cording to the royal law must allow “your neighbor to enjoy the fruit of his own labor, industry, and sweat of his brow, the freedom of his conscience and estate.” Here the Levellers recognized that if people were not secure in their “persons” and “estates” to enjoy the proceeds of their own work, their other liberties would suffer, particularly religious liberties, since the possibility of living a fully free, practical Christian life flagged in the face of material deprivation. Impoverishment diminished people’s capacity to care for themselves and one another. The “safety of the people,” then, could be preserved only by the upholding of their “natural liberties” in accord with the “royal law” of King Jesus. It was “sinful,” Lilburne wrote, for anybody “to appropriate or assume . . . a power, authority, or jurisdiction” in matters “spiritual” or “temporal” that violated the divine prerogative of the people to secure their civil, spiritual, and earthly estates.40 As practical Christian revolutionaries, the Levellers envisioned a “Republic” where the government would guard the bodily liberty and material welfare of the “whole body of the people” as jealously as they strove to preserve their spiritual and civil liberties. Vesting the body of the people with the “propriety” of their goods and labor and “a disposing power of their possessions” would maintain liberty of estates. In this way, the commonwealth would prevent the social injustice of impoverishment from afflicting those willing and able to work for their daily bread. As William Walwyn wrote, “I do think it one main end of government, to provide for those who refuse not labor.” “So far for all things common,” he proclaimed, “I am for plucking up all the pales and hedges in the nation.” This was not to have all things in common, as his critics would charge, but to have in common all things that God intended, particularly the commons themselves, which when enclosed for private gain impoverished the commonality. Walwyn proclaimed himself much “in love with St. James,” who condemned those who gained wealth and power by exploiting the poor. The Leveller Henry Denne believed that false religion generated indifference to the plight of those made poor by the avarice of others, with such socially myopic Christianity becoming a form of “bondage”’ that kept the self-impressed from succoring “your brethren of great poverty.” “The liberty of men’s persons,” including the right to enjoy the fruit of their own labor, “hath ever been a thing most precious in the eyes of our ancestors,” wrote Overton. “The wicked and unchristianlike custom of villeiny,” the form of bound labor where a lord held his workers’ liberty, labor, and material security at his own disposal, represented a “violent usurpation upon the law of our creation, nature, and the ancient laws of this kingdom. Villeiny, Overton continued, had thus been “abolished as

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a thing odious to both God and man in this our Christian commonwealth.” The liberty of bodies, advanced historically by the abolition of villeiny, now required an end to forced military labor and the banishing and imprisoning of people for debt, destitution, and matters of conscience. Lilburne, incarcerated for most of his adult life, wrote that “extorting, barbarous, and murdering gaolers” grew rich from the wrongly imprisoned, commanding fees from the inmates while allowing them to be “robbed, beaten,” and “put into iron bolts” in “houses of sodomy” where rapes occurred “unquestioned” and “unreproved.” This abuse, Lilburne exclaimed in disgust, happened mostly to “poor, poor” people who could not afford “lawyers, attorneys, solicitors,” or jailors’ fees. Without legal reform, just jurists, and humane prisons, the poor and the politically and religiously dissident would remain “enslaved prisoners.”41 Contrary to the thought of humanists such as Thomas Smith, the Levellers believed that a just commonwealth could not build the freedom of some upon the enslavement of others, by which they meant subjecting the people, most particularly the poor, to arbitrary and tyrannical institutions of political, economic, and social power. As Walwyn wrote, “Certainly, were we all busied in this short necessary truth . . . we should soon become practical Christians; and take more pleasure in feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting and comforting the sick, relieving the aged, weak and impotent; in delivering of poor prisoners, supporting of poor families, or in freeing a Commonwealth from all tyrants.” For the Levellers, the law of common equity could liberate the commonality from prerogative bondage, preserving their spiritual and civil liberties as well as their material welfare to form, as Milton called it, “the solid thing” upon which the English people could establish a free state or republic.42 Wa lw y n ’s reflections in the passage above recall how he and his friends had “busied” themselves in trying to bring their vision of reformation to life through political revolution. It’s a revealing statement, for in contrast to the way that they’re made to appear in much recent scholarship, the Levellers were more than just political writers and moral philosophers; they were republican revolutionaries who applied their practical Christian convictions to another solid thing: political action. The Levellers preached in the same churches, taverns, streets, homes, and prisons where they conducted political meetings; they led mobs, drove petitions, negotiated with generals, defied Parliament, intrigued with royalists, ran illegal printing presses, scattered leaflets in the streets, canvassed the army, inspired mutinies, physically confronted their political opponents, battled against arrest-

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ing constables, and endured debilitating stays in prison. All of this is not to romanticize the Levellers but to recognize them for what they did as well as what they thought and wrote, within contexts that ranged well beyond the intellectual and high political. Moreover, as many historians forget when they draw false dichotomies between “the Levellers” and radicals in “the army,” they fought in the civil wars. Some of them were republican writers, and brilliant ones at that, but all of them were active revolutionaries. They realized their ideas and convictions through revolutionary action, engaging in an unprecedented struggle to bring about England’s radical reformation and thus its emancipation from antichristian tyranny, not just in the political and religious spheres but in economic and social life as well. Following The Remonstrance of Many Thousands, Leveller efforts to mobilize a republican constituency in the gathered churches and the New Model Army created a constitutional crisis within the fractious ranks of the “honest party” over England’s postwar political and religious settlement. Early on an August morning in 1646, troops commanded by a figure known as Robin the Devil kicked in Richard Overton’s door, ripped the Leveller and his wife, Mary, out of bed, and dragged the pair down the street to jail, with the soldiers insulting Mary Overton as a whore and her husband as a seditious “tub preacher” in the tradition of Samuel How. In February 1647, the Committee of Examinations headed by a Colonel Leigh arrested William Kiffin, Hanserd Knollys, Thomas Patience, and Samuel Gorton on charges of lay preaching. Being raised in the “nursery of sedition”—the New England background of the last three of these suspects and their associations with leading Levellers—had made them notorious in the eyes of their godly opponents. Responding to these arrests and Presbyterian mass petitioning, the Levellers launched a new petitioning campaign from Thomas Lambe’s church in mid-March 1647. When Presbyterians in the House of Commons tried to call Lambe to account for his seditious activities, a large crowd led by the Coleman Street printer Nicholas Tew converged at Westminster to pressure the MPs to allow the petition. In front of Westminster, soldiers arrested Tew for proclaiming, “If we cannot be allowed to petition we must take some other course,” which could only have meant a violent one.43 Around the same time in the City, Presbyterians purged Independent leaders such as Coleman Street’s Isaac Pennington and Owen Rowe from the militia committee; in Parliament they went far further, voting to disband the New Model Army, hoping to nullify its potential as a radical political threat while reorganizing the soldiers into a more pliant military force for a projected Irish campaign. The soldiers were incensed that they would

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be discharged without arrears of pay and left liable to criminal charges and civil suits stemming from wartime actions. Led by Ensign Francis Nichols of Colonel Robert Lilburne’s regiment, the latter being the brother of the Leveller John Lilburne, the soldiers petitioned Parliament for their arrears, wartime indemnity, and the relief of widows and wounded soldiers. They also demanded that Parliament abandon its plans to conscript those who had volunteered for service in the New Model for the looming invasion of Ireland. In response, Ensign Nichols was arrested as an “enemy of the state,” the Leveller springtime petitions were publicly burned by the common hangman, and the soldiers’ petition was suppressed. Many soldiers would have agreed with the Leveller John Wildman, who wrote later in 1647 that Parliament preferred to “keep you still so poor.” Rather than honoring the service of the soldiers by making them citizens, the army’s enemies would first see the troops sent off to die in Ireland, or “whipped and banished as vagabonds, starved in prisons . . . [and] hanged on gallows by dozens, scores, and hundreds, as thieves and murderers.” “Banished” in this case meant being sent to the colonies as unfree plantation workers.44 Parliament’s heavy-handed response pushed the army into political action early in the summer of 1647. Without seeking permission from commanders Cromwell and Fairfax, who had promised Parliament that they would disband the army, New Model soldiers purged Presbyterian officers from their ranks and elected new ones with radical political credentials. Colonel Thomas Sheffield and his staff officers were removed by their own soldiers, who elected a new commander, the millenarian Baptist Colonel Thomas Harrison, and new officers, including the former New Englanders Cornet Wentworth Day, Major William Rainsborough, and Major Stephen Winthrop, all of whom supported the Levellers in 1647. The regiments also organized a democratic body, the “agitators,” including Major Rainsborough as well as Coleman Street underground figures such as Trooper Jeremiah Ives, Captain Henry Pretty, and Lieutenant Edmund Chillenden, who all had heard the good news of the antinomian gospel preached by another old soldier, Samuel How.45 In late May, to short-circuit a Presbyterian settlement with the king, soldiers under the command of Cornet George Joyce removed Charles I from the custody of Parliament and placed him in the hands of the New Model Army, a bold move that gave the soldiers greater leverage in Revolutionary England’s postwar political settlement. That June, in the midst of consultations with Levellers in the City, the agitators published two “engagements” or declarations that stemmed from their negotiations with the army high

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command. The first of these, A Solemn Engagement of the Army, issued at New Market, repeated the demands of the March petition and declared that the army would neither disband nor suffer conscription for Ireland. The June 14 Representation of the Army, emerging from the rendezvous at Triploe Heath, articulated the reasons for which the army waged war against the king. The soldiers, out of their own “judgment and conscience” “took up arms” “to defend our own and the people’s just rights and liberties.” Although called to arms by Parliament, they did not fight out of blind loyalty to it or to any other government, nor did they fight for pay. Convinced in conscience of the justice and honorable nature of their cause, they saw themselves as an armed instrument of liberty, rather than, as they famously put it, “a mere mercenary army hired to serve any arbitrary power of a state.” The soldiers justified their sovereignty as full-fledged members of the political nation in part on the blood sacrifice “of our dear friends and fellow soldiers and the hazard of our own lives,” which had “purchased” the “rights and liberties” that they “[laid] claim to” in their engagements. These appeals contained revolutionary potential: the soldiers, through the authority of their military labor, now claimed a place at the constitutional bargaining table.46 Taking note of these developments “from his prerogative captivity in Newgate” Prison, Overton articulated the views of many Levellers in the summer of 1647 when he called the army “the natural head of the body natural of the people at this present” time. By that autumn, however, Overton and his comrades inside and outside of the New Model had changed their tune about the army’s place in English politics. Encamped late in October along the Thames in the London suburb of Putney to prevent a Presbyterian counterrevolution, the army council, consisting of officers and agitators, with some civilians among the latter, conducted its famous series of debates at St. Mary’s Church. Although originally intended to focus on the constitutional proposals outlined in John Wildman’s Case of the Army of the Army Truly Stated, the discussions actually focused on a more comprehensive if not radical constitutional framework called An Agreement of the People. Historians have recently and convincingly shown how civilian Levellers like Lilburne, Walwyn, and Overton did not dictate the terms of the Agreement to the army agitators. Less convincingly, this insight has led the same scholars to draw rigid distinctions between the army radicals at Putney and civilian Levellers in the City. Such discrimination makes little sense, since the political and religious convictions that connected the most radical civilians and soldiers in the gathered churches and the army, articulated in the Remonstrance of Many Thousands, had coalesced

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in the rise of a popular English republican movement in the summer of 1646. A year later, in the wake of the Putney debates, those who made up this radical civilian-soldier nexus were derogatorily christened “Levellers” when they came together on behalf of the constitutional agreement proposed at Putney. Viewing the soldiers and civilians who supported the radical practical Christian concept of equity at the heart of the Agreement as seditious and socially subversive, the opponents of popular republicanism linked the “Levellers” with the early modern commonality’s opposition to prioritizing the rights of private property over the welfare of the community at large. To exacerbate the wartime anxieties of the polite members of civil society, the Levellers’ enemies thus cast the members of the movement inside and outside of the army in the most threatening rhetorical light.47 The Leveller Agreement began by celebrating the army’s victories and proclaiming that the political labor of the soldiers had entitled them to full membership in the body politic of the revolutionary commonwealth. Now that their “labors and hazards made it appear to the world at how high a rate we value our just freedom,” the soldiers sought a settlement that would abolish the House of Lords and “rule by a single person,” meaning a king vested with wide discretionary power. Biennial parliaments would be elected and the franchise reformed. The Agreement went on to list freedoms the people reserved permanently to themselves. The first of these was liberty of conscience. The second prohibited “impressing and constraining any of us to serve in the wars.” Now the New Model volunteers as well as those who had been impressed into the infantry would be free from conscription for Ireland or any future campaign. The anti-impressment platform, transferred from the Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens to the first Agreement of the People, represented one of the most radical political developments of the English Revolution. In sum, the Leveller prohibition of military conscriptions wedded the bodily freedom of citizens to their liberty of conscience, as military service would now depend on the consent of citizens—a case study of how the Levellers made the foundational republican principle of government by popular consent operative within the unpropertied commonality, the demographic most impacted by impressment. The authors of the Agreement took pains to guarantee this right for future generations, as the remainder of the impressment clause made clear. Paraphrasing Overton and Walwyn’s denouncement of impressment in the Remonstrance of Many Thousands, the authors of the Agreement of the People plainly stated that “we do not allow” the power to impress “in our representatives; the rather, because money (the sinews of war) being always at

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their disposal, they can never want numbers of men apt enough to engage in any just cause.” Given the preciousness that they attached to preserving the freedom of conscience in religion, the soldiers drew a plain corollary for conscience’s part in military service. To avoid the formation of a mercenary army in the future republic, the subscribers to the Agreement devolved the ultimate war-making power of the state to the consciences of the citizenry, who would volunteer to serve in sufficient numbers should the cause of war be just. This innovation represented a remarkable revolution in the concept of popular sovereignty. If veterans gave the new Parliament the prerogative to impress soldiers, and thus future control over military labor in the commonwealth, then the troops would forfeit the very sovereignty they were entitled to in a republic, the sovereignty they claimed through nature, historical inheritance, and their own labor in the bloody workshop of a revolutionary war.48 During the debates, Commissary-General Henry Ireton observed that the justice of the war rested “in our judgments and consciences,” the soldiers “professing to act to those ends that we have thought to be answerable and suitable to the mind of God.” Ireton’s words here testified to the consensus among all concerned at Putney, that the army’s honor derived from the soldiers’ conscientious service to the country. Their valor stood as proof positive of the reason God had made them instruments in England’s redemption from political tyranny and antichristian religion. No consensus existed at Putney, however, as to what practically constituted tyranny. As many historians have pointed out, Ireton regarded a propertied franchise as “the fundamental part of the civil constitution,” since “no person has a right to determine what laws we shall be ruled by . . . who hath not a fixed permanent interest in this kingdom.” Wildman, seeing that Ireton’s argument violated the principle of common equity suffusing the Levellers’ notion of popular sovereignty, asked the commissary general “whether any person can justly be bound by law who doth not give his consent, that such persons shall make laws for him?” Ireton responded clearly: a man “ought to be [bound to a law] that he doth not give a consent to,” explaining further that people could leave the country if they did not consent to the laws that had been made for them. Major William Rainsborough responded to Ireton by saying that government through consent was “a just and reasonable thing,” as “the chief end of government is to preserve persons as well as estates.” He continued that “persons” were “more dear to me than my estate,” citing a Leveller dogma that elevated the people’s material welfare and bodily liberty over and above the liberty to

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preserve and accumulate property. As the history of enclosure had shown and as the commonality had known and protested, the enclosure process impoverished people and left them vulnerable to losing their bodily liberty through military impressment, imprisonment, and bond slavery in the colonies. Privileging the liberty to secure and accumulate private property at the expense of the liberty of persons had thus led to physical forms of political and economic enslavement at home and abroad.49 The major’s brother, Colonel Thomas Rainsborough, spoke next, saying that if only the propertied were allowed to vote, they would “make hewers of wood and drawers of water” out of those without estates, leaving “the greatest part of the nation . . . enslaved.” The propertied franchise defied natural and divine law—as well as the way in which the Levellers read English political tradition—to cast any class of men outside the body politic so as to render them drones laboring for the profit of the propertied. Such an injustice became even worse when those deprived of their “native rights” were soldiers who had labored on behalf of the commonwealth. As Edward Sexby said, “There are many thousands of us soldiers that have ventured our lives; we have had little propriety in the Kingdom as to our estates, but we have a birthright . . . if we have not a right . . . we were mere mercenary soldiers.” He continued that denying poor soldiers the right to vote after “pressing” so many into military service “was but a distrust of providence. I do think the poor and meaner sort . . . have been the means of the preservation of this kingdom.” Although Hugh Peter tried to reconcile the antagonists, Ireton resisted and summarily dismissed Sexby’s statement as “a private prejudice.” Colonel Rainsborough, however, would not desist, asking, “I would fain know what the soldier hath fought for all this while?” He did not fight “to enslave himself, to give power to men of riches, men of estates, to make him a perpetual slave.” Addressing the injustice of the press gang and its class bias directly, Rainsborough continued, “We do find in all presses that go forth none must be pressed that are freehold men. When these gentlemen fall out among themselves, they shall press the poor scrubs to come and kill [one another] for them.” Impressment, in this construct, gave the propertied the right to make state property out of the bodies of the propertyless, to commodify them as military labor. Rainsborough recognized that without the franchise, the commonality would be left powerless, vulnerable to the embodied political enslavement occasioned by conscription as well as myriad other forms of tyranny. In a deservedly celebrated quote, he roundly declared that “the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the

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greatest he . . . the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under.” The Leveller onslaught at Putney eventually pushed the army leadership to embrace more far-reaching reforms than they had endorsed in their own draft constitution, Heads of the Proposals, although promises made to advocate for a wider franchise and the end conscription for foreign wars were soon broken.50 In early November, as the talks at Putney wound down, King Charles escaped from Hampton Court, precipitating the Second Civil War. In response, civilian and army Levellers, among whom numbered a selection of agitators, met at the Windmill Tavern in Coleman Street Ward, where they devised a plan calling for a general rendezvous of the army at Ware to press for the acceptance of the Agreement before renewing the war against the king. Lilburne, released from prison due to ill-health, led the meeting. Only two regiments, those commanded by Lilburne’s brother Robert and Colonel Thomas Harrison, heeded the Leveller call, although Lilburne and a crowd of Londoners made the journey to Corkbush Field. As we know already from the beginning of the chapter, Generals Fairfax and Cromwell rebuffed Colonel Rainsborough’s plea on behalf of the Agreement. With some of the soldiers cheering for Fairfax and the king, and others standing just as fast for a popular constitution, an order was given to round up the Leveller ringleaders in the army. Three low-ranking Leveller soldiers were told to draw straws. Private Arnold, who drew the unfortunate lot, was then shot by his two comrades. As we will see in the final chapter, the ex–New Englander and Leveller Wentworth Day, cornet in the mutinous regiment of Thomas Harrison, would never forgive Cromwell for breaking army democracy through such exemplary terror. But undeterred by the executions, the army chaplains from Lambe’s Coleman Street church, Samuel Oates and Jeremiah Ives, continued to distribute the Agreement across the countryside. Ives was later arrested on Parliament’s order for organizing a petition critical of its denunciation of the Agreement. At this time, another New Model chaplain, Samuel Gorton’s friend John Saltmarsh, lay dying at his home in Essex. In an earlier letter, Saltmarsh had warned Cromwell and Fairfax that suppressing the Levellers in the army represented “the wisdom of the flesh,” which stood opposed to “the glorious principle of Christian liberty” that relieved the burdens of the “poor,” “mean,” “oppressed and afflicted.” After the mutiny at Ware, the ailing minister summoned the strength to journey to Windsor Castle, where Cromwell and Fairfax gave him a respectful hearing. Saltmarsh did not reciprocate and refused to re-

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move his hat in their presence. He told the generals that the imprisonment of the five agitators, including his fellow Baptist Jeremiah Ives, had betrayed the cause of God. Following this dramatic confrontation at Windsor, Saltmarsh returned home and died a week later.51 The Levellers, however, were far from finished after the disappointment at Ware. Support remained pervasive within the army and the gathered churches, and to grow it even further, the movement founded its own newspaper, The Moderate. Political organizing also intensified, with the Levellers forming branch chapters in each London ward and an executive committee for the City made up of representatives elected from each chapter. Meetings were held three times a week at the Whale Bone Tavern in Coleman Street Ward. These organizational efforts bore fruit in the fall of 1648, when the Levellers conducted a successful petitioning campaign against the Long Parliament’s last-ditch efforts to save the monarchy. Cromwell and the army “grandees,” as his generals were known, were as determined as the Levellers to see Charles deposed, and so hatched a plan to purge Parliament of conciliatory, mostly Presbyterian, MPs. The army leadership thus set in motion a series of events that would cost the king his life. It was later alleged that these fateful decisions that were to alter the course of British history were made in the Star tavern on Coleman Street. In November 1648, the army leadership and the Levellers clashed over the designs against Charles and the Long Parliament in a long, contentious meeting, held fittingly at the Nag’s Head tavern, where Samuel How had once preached to future Levellers.52 The movement remained skeptical of regicide for many reasons. First, neither the New Model officers’ council nor Parliament had officially endorsed a religiously tolerant political settlement. Second, the lawfulness of regicide remained unclear, although it clearly occurred to the Levellers that the English could not found a godly commonwealth on a criminal act committed by an arbitrary power, namely the army leadership and their Independent accomplices in Parliament. Finally, as Lilburne remarked, executing the king without either due authority or a constitutional settlement in place would mean that “our slavery for the future might probably be greater than ever it was in the King’s time.” Unfortunately for the Levellers, Colonel Pride’s December 1648 purge of the Presbyterian faction in Parliament paved the way for the king’s capital trial. To assuage the Leveller faction of the Independent coalition during this turbulent period of rapid developments, Cromwell and Ireton did stage another attempt to settle a constitution, taking as the basis for debate some modifications that a committee of

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soldiers, MPs, and Levellers had made to the original Agreement. The range of participants in these discussions, held at the royal palace at Whitehall, expanded to include notable independents such as John Goodwin. Lilburne eschewed the meeting as a travesty, but Walywn and Wildman participated, closing ranks with Goodwin in defense of universal toleration, which Henry Ireton wanted to curtail in favor of a congregational church model loosely based on the New England Way. Ireton won, and although the Levellers were not done, the height of their influence had passed.53 i h av e discussed how two former New Englanders, Henry Vane and Hugh Peter, used the New Model Army as a vehicle for the cause of liberty of conscience, partnering in the process with General Oliver Cromwell, whose military brilliance helped deliver the victories that made it possible for the New Model to become an explicitly political force in the English Revolution. Other New Englanders, such as Hanserd Knollys, Thomas Patient, Thomas Tillam, and Samuel Gorton became high-profile figures among the gathered churches that supplied the New Model with volunteers and the cause of liberty of conscience with its popular base of support. The former Bay Colonists Wentworth Day, Stephen Winthrop, and William Rainsborough supported the Leveller movement and were elected officers in one of the New Model’s most politically radical regiments, leading their men in a mutiny against the army high command to promote the Leveller constitution, the first Agreement of the People. Critically, disagreement over how to interpret the republican principle of government by consent, which the Levellers articulated in their attempts to abolish the embodied political slavery of military impressment, vividly revealed the ideological cleavage between the Leveller agitators and the army’s commanding officers. This chapter has also focused on how the rise of the Leveller movement ran through the political nerve center of Coleman Street Ward, whose network of gathered churches provided the group with an organizational base. Critically, saints from the gathered churches and their members in the New Model Army traveled widely across the country, preaching antinomianism, demanding liberty of conscience, and fulminating against kingly government. Already politicized by gathered church membership and the Revolution of 1640–42, tens of thousands of saints and soldiers in 1645–46, fearing that the Presbyterian ascendancy in Parliament would accommodate the king and destroy liberty of conscience, lent their hands first to extreme Independent petitions and later to the petitions associated with the Leveller movement. At this time, operating usually somewhere in Coleman Street

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Ward, Richard Overton’s secret press became the Levellers’ unofficial publishing house. We have also seen how Christian mysticism, natural law, and English political traditions, refined in the fire of wartime labor, sacrifice, and impoverishment, produced a practical Christian moral philosophy of social justice that drove the republican politics of the Leveller movement. For the Levellers, prerogative institutions in the church, state, and society embodied the very essence of sin, or self-seeking, which, in contrast to practical Christian love, usurped the natural liberty with which God, as a lover of all persons and respecter of none, had endowed his common creation. The Levellers understood the condition created by the usurpation of the divine prerogative as a form of slavery, different of course from chattel slavery, but nevertheless a truly lived experience of unfreedom that amounted to far more than a figure of speech in a language of liberty. To be free in civil and spiritual terms and secure in the material necessities of life, the Levellers sought the abolition of a wide range of prerogative institutions, both political and economic. These ranged from the monarchy and the House of Lords to enclosures and the press gang; their termination, the Levellers believed, would establish the temporal vitality of the law of “common equity,” or the Christian golden rule, as the “solid thing” upon which to found a free state. Subsequently, the Levellers viewed the relief of the poor as one of the state’s main social ends. The government also had sacred duties to secure the fruit of each person’s labor and to protect citizens from being conscripted into the military or forced into some form of servitude where they would be made to work against their will. For the Levellers, labor became a foundation of human dignity and commonwealth citizenship, not a commodity to be exploited for state power and maximized private profits. The next chapter moves back out across the Atlantic, turning from the democratic radicalism of the English Revolution to focus on its imperial antithesis during the Interregnum. Focusing on a network of elite revolutionaries concentrated in Coleman Street Ward and led by the colonial investor Martin Noell, we will see how those who exercised the most influence over the revolutionary governments of the Interregnum secured the power and liberty of the “freeborn English” through the conquest of Ireland and the enslavement of people from around the Atlantic in England’s nascent empire.

chapter six R

“That Crimson Stream of Blood” The Imperial Turn of the English Revolution

Yet sometimes nations will decline so low From virtue, which is reason, that no wrong, But justice and some fatal curse annexed, Deprives them of their outward liberty, Their inward lost. —John Milton, Paradise Lost, book 121 mo s t ly barefoot and clothed in rags, three thousand men and boys braced against the winter wind as it whipped along the Portsmouth docks. Some were conscripts returned from service in Ireland, where they had proved so unruly that their officers had shipped them back to England. Others had taken to the roads in search of work before being rounded up, pressed into the army, and force-marched to Portsmouth. More still, languishing in poverty or lured by easy money, had turned to thievery. After being caught, convicted, and offered the choice to die in the army or on the gallows, they had taken their chances as soldiers. In village pubs, in market squares, and in the streets and taverns of England’s port cities, more men of modest means had been enticed into the army with the promise of pillage and plunder in the Caribbean. Runaway apprentice boys and thrillseeking youngsters had also made their way to the Hampshire coast. They had been drawn there by dreams of adventure on the high seas with the great fleet riding at anchor in Portsmouth harbor, where thirty-eight ships manned by 4,170 sailors made ready to set sail in early December 1654. Although they had taken different paths to the waterfront, once they reached 198

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the docks the men and boys all received the same abusive treatment from their officers. Busy in the work of England’s top-to-bottom godly reformation, the expedition’s officers despised the motley commonality under their command, viewing them as mutinous and seditious scum that needed to be scoured from the land. The rough handling they received from their officers, and the fact that the expedition’s destination remained unknown to the men, made them increasingly anxious about the fate that awaited them “beyond the seas.” As an officer in the expedition, Lieutenant Colonel Francis Barrington, later remembered, word began spreading through the ranks that they were not meant to fight but rather to be “sold” as “slaves” to a “foreign prince.” When the fleet’s cannon fired the signal to board, the men mutinied, running away through the back lanes of Portsmouth to hide in brothels, taverns, shops, sheds, or any other out-of-the-way place. Once they had been rounded up again, the troops proved so unwilling to board that General Henry Desborough used the backside of his horse to force the recalcitrant soldiers up the gangplanks and onto their ships. Once on deck, the soldiers plotted another mutiny, also unsuccessful, where they planned to ground their ships at the Isle of Wight to escape bondage.2 The chaos at Portsmouth marked the less than auspicious launching of the “Western Design,” the name contemporaries gave to the Revolutionary government’s invasion of the Spanish West Indies. As the fleet made its way across the Atlantic that December, the sailor Henry Whistler noted in his journal that “Captain Ball’s . . . negor died” after being “wasted” by a “long sickness.” Sailors dumped the black man’s body over the ship’s rails and into the waves, a prophetic act in a venture that would soon be condemned for “pour[ing]” forth human beings “like water in waste.” When the fleet dropped anchor five weeks later in Barbados, sailors discovered that the expedition’s provisions were nearly exhausted. The scarcity of food prompted Admiral William Penn to strike the names of all “boys belonging to the fleet” from the “state’s books,” forbidding them “for the future . . . any allowance of diet, or wages.” Admiral Penn had decided that the youngest members of his command were the most expendable; the boys would either starve or be fed by charitable sailors or colonists. Soon after Penn gave this order, two boys serving in the armada were devoured by a shark while swimming near their ship in Carlisle Bay. After witnessing the horrifying spectacle, an officer wrote with bitter sarcasm that “the hand of providence” had worked through the sharks to release the officers of their “burden.” The witness’s biting comment exposed the hypocrisy of the expedition, whose command-

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ers, with all of their pretenses of doing God’s work in the world, abused the children who had been placed under their care.3 Three months later in April, when General Robert Venables finally moved against the expedition’s chief target, the Spanish garrison on Hispaniola, his spectacular ineptitude as a commander led to a series of bloody debacles. Hundreds of his troops, caught in ambushes on narrow jungle paths, were skewered by lance-wielding “Spanish” militiamen more motley than the English invaders. Hundreds of others died of dehydration and the “bloody flux,” a condition known now as dysentery. Having left a thousand dead on Hispaniola, Venables jettisoned the rest on Jamaica, leaving them to fend for themselves, before returning to London in the wake of the already departed Admiral Penn. “I.S.,” the eyewitness to the shark attack in Barbados, wrote that abandoning the men on Jamaica fulfilled one of the main ends of this Caribbean campaign, the “utter extirpation of all idle, profane, irreligious ones . . . sent over as soldiers and servants into this new conquered commonwealth.” I.S. did not exaggerate. Six thousand of the seven thousand soldiers on Jamaica perished from disease, malnutrition, and overwork, as they had been forced to labor on Spanish plantations now claimed by their officers and the financial sponsors of the expedition. For many of the dying men, one of their last acts on earth took the form of resistance. After the fear of being enslaved had driven them into mutiny at Portsmouth, they realized that their worst fears had actually materialized on Jamaica. They mutinied again, refusing to work, striking back against their exploitation and stolen liberty. With morale plunging into mutinous despair, the officers had as much trouble disciplining their soldiers as they did hunting down Jamaica’s runaway slaves, who staged hit-and-run attacks on the English from maroon colonies hidden away in the lush forests of the island’s Blue Mountains.4 This chapter discusses the imperial turn of the English Revolution, when the English state, through legislation and force of arms, undertook the first systematic attempt to consolidate Ireland and the Atlantic colonies into a profitably organized and politically potent empire, a historic initiative that transformed, in corrupted form, Richard Hakluyt’s imperial vision into commonwealth policy.5 The discussion here focuses on how saints returned from the colonies and from the ranks of the Coleman Street elite worked in concert as moving forces behind the Revolution’s imperial turn. From the top down, they designed and executed imperial initiatives and colonial projects that relied upon innovative legislation and sophisticated forms of financing as well as naval warfare, landed conquest, military conscription,

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slave trading, and a spectrum of chattel labor set to work on cash crop plantations. But from the bottom up, we see that hundreds of thousands of people from around the Atlantic world were swept unwillingly into the violent vortex that powered England’s expansion into the Americas. These many thousands gone experienced the impact of England’s emergent political economy as terroristic and often lethal violence. The brutality meted out by the revolutionary state displayed its willingness to destroy tens of thousands of its own people and hundreds of thousands of others in Ireland, Africa, and the Americas, all for the ostensible glory of God—which the commonwealth measured through the increase of its own and its supporters’ wealth and power. But these human beings did not go without a fight. Army and navy mutinies, republican insurgencies, crowd actions, slave and servant rebellions, and slave revolts arose around the English Atlantic, where commoners, servants, soldiers, sailors, and slaves strove to secure their lives and liberties, all of which England’s imperial expansion threatened to make forfeit. I n late January 1649, a hastily convened court convicted King Charles I as a traitor for waging war against his own people. John Goodwin lent his support to the execution with the tract Right and Might Well Met, although John Milton’s Eikonklastes became the most famous defense of the execution. Goodwin’s congregants Mark Hildesley, Thomas Barnardiston, and Daniel Taylor worked in London’s Common Council to support the regicide petition of their fellow parishioner Owen Rowe. Rowe actually sat as one the king’s official judges and signed the royal death warrant, which sealed his own fate twelve years later after the restoration of Charles II. Another member of Goodwin’s church, Isaac Pennington, received an appointment to the regicide court. Pennington, always the political animal, had the good sense to argue for the execution while not putting his name to the order. As we will see in the Restoration, however, this subtle ploy did little help to the former lord mayor.6 As historians have long known, however, Sir Henry Vane opposed the execution of the King. A recently purchased manuscript in the Bodleian Library contains an account of a discussion between Oliver Cromwell and his chief advisers that might shed further light on Vane’s opposition. In the manuscript an anonymous speaker grows exasperated with the king’s trial and describes the proceedings as not only unlawful but indeed a sin against God, whose providential care of their righteous cause had preserved it against tyranny. Executing the king, in this counselor’s view, would stem

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from an arbitrary form of self-interest inconsistent with “the old cause, which if it be still as just as it was” would not require illicit bloodshed to preserve. The passage warrants quoting at length: Have we no other way to account God, but by diminishing him in the value and effects of his Providence. . . . Wherefore did we invoke him for patronage if now we want to provoke him by relapsing to a vassalage, and to those shackles which Royalty had impaired for us and our posterity? It were something if we had insulted in our victories, if we had looked more on our own carnal hands than on the dignity of this work.7

The selection above reflects the same style of expression, the same providential language, and the same critique of self-interest that Vane would use in two pamphlets of the 1650s, The Retired Man’s Meditations and A Healing Question. Yet despite the internal opposition to regicide, on January 30, 1649, a hooded executioner beheaded Charles I in front of the Banquet Hall at Whitehall Palace. A ghastly moan escaped from the crowd as the ax fell upon the king, giving voice to the English people’s shock at the enormity and audacity of the act. Cromwell, though, was as blunt as ever. “We will cut off the king’s head with the crown on it” he said to the young republican Colonel Algernon Sidney. The regicide’s unpopularity compelled the House of Commons to publicly justify the execution in suddenly strident republican language. “It hath been found by experience,” the House declared, “that the office of a King . . . is unnecessary, burdensome, and dangerous to the liberty, safety, and public interest of the people . . . one person in such power makes it his interest to encroach upon the just freedom and liberty of the people . . . so they might enslave these kingdoms to their own lust.” Even if the revolutionaries could not close on the wisdom and legality of regicide in 1649, they had largely, with the exception of most Presbyterians, closed ranks against kingly government for the time being.8 The revolutionaries’ problems, however, hardly ended with the execution of Charles I and the establishment of the English Republic or “free state.” The godly or “honest party,” torn apart by their conflicting visions of postwar settlement, stood in need of healing as desperately as the nation itself. But “if there was one thing which could be relied upon to unite the majority of Englishmen,” as the historian Blair Worden has written, “it was the hatred of the Irish.” In the spring of 1649, the Rump judged that whipping up ancient English hatred for the Irish would pay off politically. In their inventive view, James Butler, duke of Ormonde, lord lieutenant of Ireland, and commander of a mostly Catholic Irish army, stood ready to send

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his papist hordes swarming across the Irish Sea to slit the throats of honest Protestants in a reprise of the 1641 rebellion. Initially, army leaders greeted this construction of the common enemy du jour with skepticism. In March, when the Rump called on General Cromwell, who truly despised the Irish, to take command of an expeditionary force to Ireland, the war hero replied, “I think there is more cause of danger from disunion amongst ourselves than by anything from our enemies.”9 In the view of other saints, however, an Irish conquest could generate political as well as economic capital for the new government. Sending much of the New Model to Ireland while ordering out the press gangs to force more men to fight across the Irish Sea could help neutralize unruly elements of the commonality that the Levellers had been organizing politically, much to the dismay of the Rump. The Irish campaign would also create new economic opportunities for the revolutionary state and its financial backers. While initially a drain on the treasury, such a war could solve several of the government’s financial problems. Confiscated crown and Catholic land in Ireland could be used to pay off the soldiers’ arrears, while London financiers and merchant “Adventurers” would invest in the design, taking stakes in Irish land as security. Dispossessing Catholic natives and enclosing their holdings would also generate more profitable agricultural productivity, which of course would substantially increase the tax revenue that Ireland could generate to finance future wars with Continental rivals. Cromwell himself soon came around to the view that the expedition would avenge the Protestant martyrs of 1641 and liberate their families still suffering under the antichristian bondage of the papist menace. The general warned that without being thoroughly reduced by the sword, the barbaric Irish would persist in bloody rebellion and would most likely join forces with the royal pretender to “overrun England,” end the reformation, and place the nation under the popish “tyranny that formerly we were under the yoke of.”10 Although compelling to many, playing the Irish card with such urgency failed to convince thousands of New Model Army soldiers to undertake the brutal work of imperial conquest, this despite the fact that most of them harbored virulent views of Irish Catholics. Most of the soldiers in 1649, like their predecessors in 1647, did not object in principle to an invasion of Ireland, but they wanted their arrears paid and their political grievances addressed. They also distrusted what they regarded as the mercenary motives of the Irish design’s progenitors in Parliament and the merchant community. As one soldier wrote, “We are sensible, yea far more sensible for the bleeding condition of Ireland crying for a brotherly assistance than those

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forward undertakers in the present design manifest themselves to be.” The Levellers played an instrumental part in organizing discontent in the army, although as Norah Carlin has argued, exaggerated “memories” of Protestant deaths during the Irish rebellion of 1641 probably limited the popular appeal of resistance. The Leveller newspaper The Moderate Intelligencer published an anonymous series critical of the invasion called “Certain Queries.” It ran for six weeks and received wide circulation among the encampments of the New Model, as well as the taverns and meetinghouses frequented on Coleman Street by their civilian supporters in the sects. The soldiers cited a litany of grievances, including arrears of pay, impressment for military service, restrictions on petitioning, and the alleged mercenary principles of Parliament and the army high command. A minority of soldiers would have agreed with the anonymous Leveller who argued that the conquest of Ireland would “deprive a people of the land God and nature has given them and [would] impose laws without their consent.” When Leveller leaders were arrested at the height of the agitation, women Levellers rallied to their support, descended on Parliament with a petition, and were told there to “stay at home and wash their dishes.” The women responded with a mass petition that appealed to the Petition of Right and the “good laws of the land” and concluded by asking whether they were considered so “sottish or stupid as not to perceive . . . when . . . those strong defenses of our peace and welfare are broken down and trod underfoot by force and arbitrary power?”11 The Leveller campaign against the second projected invasion of Ireland sparked a second series of army mutinies that plunged the republic into its first imperial crisis only two months after its birth. Although most mutineers vowed that they would fight if given their arrears and satisfaction regarding their constitutional concerns, others sided with a comrade who concluded that “we have waded too far in that crimson stream already of innocent, Christian blood.” To quell the unrest, Cromwell moved decisively on April 27 and ordered the execution of Robert Lockyer, a New Model soldier of influence among the mutineers. Lockyer’s funeral became one of the most noted popular political spectacles of the early modern period, with thousands of Londoners marching through the crowded streets in a procession that wound its way through Coleman Street Ward to its final destination in Moorfields. A year before, crowds of similar size had turned out for the funeral of the Leveller Thomas Rainsborough, who had been assassinated by a royalist raiding party at Doncaster Castle. Rainsborough had opposed the 1647 invasion of Ireland despite the fact that he would

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have profited from it, having invested in the Irish Adventurers scheme of 1641—a case study of the protean nature of militant Protestant political belief during the English Revolution.12 Following the execution of Lockyer, army Levellers staged another mutiny in May led in part by Coleman Streeters and ex–New Englanders. William Thomson along with the Coleman Street Baptist Henry Denne, now a cornet in the regiment of Colonel Adrian Scroope, organized a revolt of mutinous soldiers at Burford, Oxfordshire, that included Colonel Thomas Harrison’s regiment, which under the leadership of former Bay Colonists Cornet Wentworth Day, Captain Stephen Winthrop, and Major William Rainsborough, had first mutinied at Ware in 1647. Carrying a regimental flag that bore an image of the severed head of King Charles underscored by the motto “The good of the people is the highest law,” Cornet Day once again squared off against General Cromwell in defense of republican revolution. The action at Burford, unlike that at Ware, escalated into real fighting after Cromwell’s lieutenants broke a promise negotiated by Colonel John Okey, a former agitator, that none of the mutineers would be harmed. To terrorize aspiring dissent into submission, the general ordered the summary execution of mutineers Private John Church, Corporal Perkins, and Cornet James Thompson. Henry Denne begged successfully for his life, earning him the enmity of his comrades, who would refer to him in the future as “Judas Denne.” According to the historian G. E. Aylmer, the Leveller threat within the army, which might have prevented the Irish conquest, was “the most serious and sustained attempt at popular revolution by physical force in seventeenth-century England.” “Yet,” as Aylmer correctly concludes, it was “easily suppressed.” Disgusted, Cornet Day left the army rather than serve as a mercenary in Ireland. In contrast, Sir Hardress Waller, an English colonist from the Irish province of Munster and a veteran of the Irish campaigns of the 1640s, rejoiced that “the Lord” had aided the high command in confounding the “monstrous levelers.” Waller’s enthusiasm got the better of him in this case; although three heads of the seditious hydra had been removed through the execution of the Leveller mutineers, Cornet Day would soon help rear more of them as a sectarian conventicler in Coleman Street Ward.13 Violent political repression administered by the state weakened the Leveller movement and cleared the way for the invasion of Ireland. But the republic might have pursued more peaceful though less profitable means to secure the island by seriously engaging in diplomatic overtures for peace conducted by Irish Catholic leaders from Ulster. Powerful elements within the northern Catholic elite led by Eoghan Ruadh Ó Néill (anglicized as

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Owen Rowe O’Neill) and Randal MacDonnell, marquis of Antrim, had dispatched their respective agents, the Cistercian Abbott Patrick Crelly and Father Edmund Reilly, to London and Dublin. There the negotiators sought a settlement under the auspices of the English Commonwealth that would guarantee Catholics full toleration and civil liberties. The Ulster Catholic leadership under Ó Néill and MacDonnell, commanding perhaps the most proven fighting force in Ireland, had broken with the king’s leading partisan in Ireland, James Butler, the royalist duke of Ormonde, having become frustrated with Ormonde’s anti-Catholic prejudices, his domineering persona, and his disastrously ineffectual leadership. But the Ulster Catholics had also split with the Catholic bishops of the confederation, having had enough of what they saw as the clerics’ officious and uncompromising religious politics. In sum, Irish Catholic leaders MacDonnell and Ó Néill offered the English Republic an alliance based on its own ostensible principles of liberty, all to undermine royalism’s future in Ireland, which the Rump publicized as the greatest danger facing the country. The overture from Catholic Ulster, however, could not overcome English Protestant bigotry, nor could it accommodate the chief concerns of the revolutionaries now in office at Whitehall and Westminster: the neutralization of domestic political dissent, the conscription of the mutinous poor into military service, and the colonial subjugation of Ireland and the expropriation of the country’s land and labor. Militant Protestant prejudice and political economy thus combined to short-circuit any possibility that England’s problems with Ireland would be resolved without the sword.14 T h e Irish campaign commenced in August 1649 with the specter of October 1641 haunting the commanders of the New Model Army, who chose the colonial ritual of atrocity to exorcise the dark ghosts of the rebellion. Indeed, the horrific violence visited upon Catholic Ireland had tangled roots that stretched deep into the country’s experience with English colonialism. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, clearing Irish Catholic “savages” from the land through war, massacre, summary execution, burning, pillaging, cottage-tumbling, and state-planned famine became standard practice in the Munster and Ulster plantation schemes. Throughout the first half of the seventeenth century, the English colonial project in Ireland intensified the enforcement of Tudor recusancy laws and made the violent implementation of martial law routine. Avenging the killing of Protestants in 1641 only deepened the cycle of colonial violence in Ireland, as candid correspondence reveals that Catholic civilians and surrendering troops

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were systematically killed by Protestant soldiers and civilians. In 1643, for instance, the godly Londoner Captain William Tucker, onetime colonist in Virginia, trafficker in unfree colonial labor, and the man responsible for massacring two hundred Powhatan Indians following Opecanhanough’s rising, rejoiced in the deaths of Irish Catholic men, women, and children at Kilkenny, where troops under Sir Richard Grenville busied themselves in “killing and destroying by fire and sword all that came” in their way. In August 1647, Colonel Michael Jones presided over the worst atrocity of the war, when his soldiers murdered three to five thousand Catholic troops who had surrendered in a bog in County Meath, hard by Dungan’s Hill; their executioners had manacled some of the Catholic soldiers to make an easier job of the butchery.15 On September 11, 1649, a little over a month after landing in Ireland, General Oliver Cromwell stormed through a breach in the walls of Drogheda at the head of his vaunted army; a massacre of the besieged garrison ensued, on Cromwell’s personal order, with over twenty-five hundred soldiers killed, having been shot, put to the sword, or “knocked in the head,” as the general reported to Parliament. An unknown number of civilians were also murdered. Undoubtedly, English soldiers purposely targeted civilians, though not on Cromwell’s order, shooting through the windows of houses and murdering Catholic clergy in open view. A few heroic soldiers intervened to save the lives of a handful of Drogheda’s most fortunate residents. Cromwell specifically stated in his September 27 letter to the speaker of the House of Commons, John Lenthall, that “many inhabitants” had been killed once the English had breached the walls. The carnage at Drogheda, like the bloodshed to follow a month later at Wexford, offers a classic study in colonial terrorism, where massive violence directed against a concentration of insurgent “savages” was intended to deter the remainder from resisting, thus paving the way for civilized “plantation.” Cromwell wrote that the killing at Drogheda had filled the Irish with “much terror.” The marquis of Ormonde agreed, writing to the king that it could “not be imagined how great the terror . . . that those successes” at Drogheda and Wexford “have struck into” the Irish population.16 Historians, however, have disagreed about how to put the terrible killings at Wexford and Drogheda into their proper context. Some have seen the events as typical examples of the ruthlessness of early modern warfare, the conventions of which, rooted in medieval tradition, allowed besiegers to kill the defenders of a town that refused to surrender. But in the seventeenth century, military commanders on the Continent had begun turning to the

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ideas of humanists such as Hugo Grotius, who placed a premium on the Christian charity of soldiers, who were to show mercy and civility to their conquered foes. Given Grotius’s growing influence, the commonwealth’s conquest of Ireland hardly fits comfortably within the mutable conventions of early modern warfare. Placed within a wider Atlantic context, however, the Irish conquest does square with the kind of warfare that English colonists had long waged in Ireland itself and had begun to wage against Indian “savages” across the Atlantic in the Chesapeake and New England.17 We can trace the transatlantic connection between Irish and American colonialism by following the career of George Cooke around the English Atlantic. Cooke had hunted down Pequots in the Connecticut River Valley and had helped in firing Samuel Gorton’s settlement at Shawomet before returning to England to wage war against the king. His service earned him a commission as a colonel in the Irish invasion force, commanding the regiment formerly led by the Leveller Thomas Rainsborough, which mutinied against Cooke at Minehead before being forced to embark for Ireland. After serving with Cromwell in the slaughters at Drogheda and Wexford, Cooke advanced God’s work in Ireland as Wexford’s military governor. There Cooke faced a formidable foe, the “tories,” or Catholic soldiers who deserted from Ormonde’s army to continue fighting the English in much the same style that Indians had utilized against American colonists. As one English officer lamented in a report to his superiors, the tories “disperse and divide themselves into several woods and bogs within our quarters in the other provinces . . . [being] very numerous [they] are able to draw together on a sudden parties of considerable strength to engage your other forces, left to secure the country, upon any advantage and can, when any forces draw towards them to engage them, disperse at an instant and embody again in other remote bogs and inaccessible quarters.” The Irish commissioners reported to Parliament that “the English cannot safely travel two miles from any of the said garrisons without a convoy, which proceeds from the general disaffection of the Irish” and “the daily increasing numbers of tories” concealed in “woods, bogs, and fastnesses.” Lightning raids staged by tory insurgents frustrated the progress of the Irish conquest and drove Cooke and other English officers to desperate measures. In New England, following the lead of Elizabethan conquistadors in Ireland, Cooke had burned the crops of Pequots following the massacre at Fort Mystic, to force Indians into submission through starvation. When Cooke sailed back across the Atlantic twelve years later, he carried this cruel tactic to Ireland, redeploying a weapon of English colonialism long favored in the protracted war of

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conquest waged against the Irish population. Facing down tory insurgents commanded by a “Colonel Nash,” Cooke ordered his troops to burn the cottages and cut the crops of Catholics suspected of supporting Nash’s irregulars. Government correspondents in Wexford reported in April that “many poor people are starved, and more are starving for want of corn.” Cooke also turned to the sword in Wexford, launching a “slaughter” that per the reckoning of the Venetian ambassador killed over four thousand people and lasted “four days running.”18 The conquest of Catholic Ireland, like that of New England’s Pequot Indians, depended on two kinds of warfare, one waged against combatants and the other against civilians. Regarding the latter form in Ireland, the successive representatives of the English state, Generals Henry Ireton, Charles Fleetwood, and Edmund Ludlow, oversaw a systemic destruction of Ireland’s food supply in order to deprive the tory insurgency of civilian support. The English army had scythes specially imported from England for this purpose, and many commanders besides George Cooke, including Levellers such as Colonel William Eyre, participated in the attempt to starve Irish Catholics into submission. While tory resistance never collapsed in the face of the English occupation, the starvation policy did produce the desired effect of famine. In July 1652, the Irish commissioners reported to the Council of State that “many of the inhabitants are perishing daily from want . . . common food of them in many places being horseflesh, grass, and green ears of corn.” A little less than a year later, conditions had drastically worsened. An army account from Ireland in May 1653 described “the great multitudes of poor swarming in all parts of the nation, occasioned by the devastation of the country . . . some are found feeding on carrion and weeds, some starved in the highways . . . fed upon by ravening wolves and the beasts and birds of prey.” Incredibly, that same month, the Irish commissioners warned Parliament against any “temptation” to be more “lenient” to Irish Catholics, as “our behavior towards this people may never sufficiently avenge . . . the barbarous wickedness” of the “cruel murders and massacres” of the 1641 rebellion. Such statements, contrasted to the actual scale of violence that the New Model Army visited upon Catholics, make it hard to fathom the lust for vengeance and profits that drove the colonial conquest of Ireland. Within the conquest’s initial phase (1649–53) 20 percent of the Irish population perished, compared to 3 percent of the English population during the fighting in the 1640s. To put these figures into historical perspective, scholars have rated the bloodletting of the civil wars as the costliest conflict in English history by ratio of population.19

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Cooke’s superior in Ireland, General Henry Ireton, took care to have a medal struck commemorating the Irish conquest and its murderous methods. The medal depicted English soldiers setting an Irish cottage aflame as combat raged in the background. The Latin motto on the medal read, “Iustitia necessitasq iubet,” or “Justice and necessity commanded it,” the blunt candor of which at least avoided the perversity of the Bay Colony seal that depicted an Indian begging the English to “Come Over and Help Us.” Moreover, as with the Pequot War in 1637, “savage” survivors of colonial conquest in Ireland were shipped as chattel property to work “against their consciences” on colonial plantations. Pequots were enslaved for life; although thousands of Irish died during their days as bond slaves, others were freed, some having had indentures imposed on them. Just as the godly across the Atlantic in the United Colonies and earlier generations of the English in Ireland had justified the destruction of their native opponents, the English Commonwealth, in its own Irish conquest, turned to savage methods to civilize a supposedly savage people. This point addresses a larger one in the history of English imperialism and the myths surrounding its origins. Despite the self-justifying language enlisted to spin the ideological pretense that it advanced the common cause of humanity, England’s Atlantic empire was not forged through peaceful commerce and the creation of colonial commonwealths designed to spread liberty and civilization among indigenous populations. In the seventeenth century, in contrast to the English rhetoric of empire-building, wherever English colonial militias and imperial armies ventured, they destroyed, displaced, and enslaved the combatants and civilians who dared to combine to defend their common liberty.20 A l t hough much less so than in Ireland, the republic’s invasion of its western neighbor led to suffering in England itself, as it exacerbated one of the worst economic crises of the English seventeenth century. The massive provisions shipped from England to feed the army in Ireland enriched merchant contractors but drove up food prices at home, where supplies were growing increasingly scarce. The drenching rains of the summer of 1648 followed by exceptionally harsh frosts in the spring of 1649 were succeeded by a drought that summer, the result being very poor harvests and higher food prices, with the cost of wheat rising 35 percent over the average increase of the previous thirty years. As a result, the cost of living in London rose by over a third, while real wages had plummeted by a fifth from where they stood earlier in the decade. Petitions streamed into local and national governments seeking aid and blaming the rich for becom-

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ing so through their exploitation of the less powerful, pointing an accusing finger at wealthy MPs and London merchants “who grind our faces . . . and . . . devour us as if our flesh was bread.” While many magistrates tried to provide some direct relief, Parliament and the Council of State did next to nothing on this score; most of the nation’s funds were being spent on the Irish war effort.21 Rather than relieve the poor, the lord mayor of London sought to relieve London of the “burden” they placed on the city, looking to Bridewell, much as his predecessors had, to confine the “rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars . . . which wander about the streets and lanes . . . to the dishonor of the City.” Parliament, it should be mentioned, had recently given the lord mayor the option of emptying London’s jails to supply the colonies with unfree plantation labor. Parliament also had designs on the liberty of the Leveller leaders who had become the chief advocates of the English poor; on March 28, soldiers arrested Richard Overton, Thomas Prince, and William Walwyn.22 The Leveller leaders had been busy blasting the new regime with petitions and critical tracts, with Walwyn’s biting treatise The Vanity of the Present Churches placing the new government and its supporters in a particularly unflattering light. Here Walwyn bitterly recalled the Levellers’ attempt to forge a second Agreement of the People with prominent Independents, led by a delegation from Goodwin’s church, and representatives from Parliament and the army. The second Agreement failed, Walwyn believed, because his counterparts were less devoted to fundamental reform and more interested in chasing “good estates . . . [and] . . . good benefices . . . to increase their trades and advance their own custom and dealing in the world [which] now and then helps to a good round office.” The corruption of practical Christianity, and hence Leveller-styled republican virtue, “over-awed” the saints “into a high esteem of mere vanities,” making them “empty clouds that hold no water.” While the godly elite had helped bring the republic into being, they had deprived it of the essential substance of common equity, which for the Levellers consisted of liberty of conscience and social and economic justice. Walwyn urged eminent saints to set aside their baubles and Bibles to begin using their power in the private and public realms to “feed the hungry [and] clothe the naked.”23 Walwyn’s tract pushed the leaders of the Independent churches to publicly disavow the Levellers and to reassure their allies in Parliament and the army that their days of radical politicking were over. Choosing the Coleman Street Baptist William Kiffin as their spokesman, they declared in a servile statement of submission that “our meetings are not intended to intermeddle

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with the ordering or altering of civil government [which we humbly and submissively leave unto the supreme powers] but solely for the advancement of the gospel.” For the nation’s good, the clerics promised, their churches would in “no way comply with the disturbers” of the new state and the “despisers of them that are in authority . . . it being our grief that our meetings should be” construed as having anything to do with “earthly respects whatsoever.” Although many in these congregations still sympathized with the Levellers, their clerical leaders would no longer allow them to serve as a base of support for the movement. Adding his voice to this cringing chorus in a tract that he titled Walwyn’s Wiles, John Price, a political polemicist and prominent member of Goodwin’s church, wrote that the Levellers would not be “well . . . until . . . cobblers be chosen into places of magistracy and government” and so bring the commonwealth to “misery and ruin.”24 Resurrecting one of the revolution’s most iconic figures, Walwyn replied to Price and the Independent position he represented by conjuring up the ghost of the Cobbler, Samuel How. “It seems,” wrote the Coleman Streeter to Price and by virtue, his pastor, John Goodwin, “your congregation is of near relation to those that hold prosperity a mark of the true church.” But why scorn the mean and poor when Christ “did certainly judge otherwise than these churchmen,” for Jesus had “chosen simple herdsmen for his prophets, and poor fishermen for his Apostles.” As for “cobblers,” the Leveller continued, “there are trades” held in more esteem though “hardly so useful. . . . Besides, there was a time when Samuel How, a cobbler by trade, and a contented man in that calling, was not ashamed to preach before your most learned pastor, and printed his sermon afterwards; and your pastor hath changed his mind since, and is come somewhat nearer to his judgment.” But God himself would pass judgment on the lack of Christian charity within Goodwin’s congregation. Drawing from Matthew 25, Walwyn prophesied that the King of kings would cast “away ye workers of iniquity,” saying, “I know ye not, for when I was hungry, ye fed me not: naked, ye clothed me not; sick and in prison, and ye visited me not; inasmuch as ye did it not unto these, ye did it not unto me . . .” “Indeed friends,” wrote Walwyn, “you manifest to all the world that your ways are” not the ways of Christ but “the ways rather to good offices and benefices, too.” The Leveller then excoriated his former friends for selling out the Revolution through their support of the Irish conquest. Drawing on a famous phrase from Joshua 7:1 condemning the sin of private profit from war, Walwyn prophesied, “[T]he accursed thing is accepted by them” who “shed blood for money . . . wealth and honor.”25

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Walwyn leveled serious charges at his fellow merchants-saints, but were they accurate? Did wealthy members of Goodwin’s Coleman Street church and other well-to-do figures among the gathered churches ingratiate themselves with the new regime? Did their political connections enable them to grow even richer as merchants and as civil servants? If so, did these riches come at the expense of the poor? The available evidence seems to confirm Walwyn’s allegations, with some qualifications. There are indications that Walwyn painted his opponents with too broad a brush. For instance, Daniel Taylor of Goodwin’s church published a program of political and economic reform in 1651 that he hoped would cause “all honest-hearted” men to “rejoice” in the reformation that the new “republic” would work upon England. Like the Levellers, Taylor criticized tithes and the corruption of lawyers and tax collectors, bemoaning how they “ruin and destroy multitudes of families,” particularly those of small traders. Taylor also lined up with the Levellers by calling for the abolition of debtor prisons.26 Taylor’s plans for public-spirited reform, however, hardly lessen the credibility of Walwyn’s charges. First, Goodwin’s parish as well as most of London’s congregational churches contained a disproportionate number of wealthy saints and revolutionaries who engaged in commerce or manufacturing. Isaac Pennington, Mark Hildesley, Nathaniel Lacy, and Daniel Taylor made fortunes in manufacturing, retail, and trade, the latter mostly in Continental markets. Owen Rowe, James Russell, Richard and John Price, Thomas and William Allen, Thomas Alderne, and Thomas Barnardiston, all of St. Stephen’s in Coleman Street, were wealthy men who figured importantly within the set of fifty godly merchants associated with the ubiquitous colonialist Maurice Thomson, a member of William Greenhill’s Independent congregation. Identified by the historian Robert Brenner as indispensable to the political and financial fortunes of the Revolutionary cause, Thomson and his ever-expanding network of militant Protestant partners launched “interloping” ventures to the Mediterranean, East Indies, and northern Europe, often in violation of the Levant, East Indian, and Baltic Company charters. They also looked to the Atlantic colonies as commercial outlets, filling a void left by the Merchant Adventurers Company, the bedrock institution of London’s merchant establishment, many of whose members considered colonial investment too risky. Led by Martin Noell, a chief financier of the crucial West Indies sugar boom that might have done more than anything else in the seventeenth century to shape the future course of the English empire, the merchant saints of Coleman Street Ward and elsewhere poured investment capital into the colonies and colonial commerce,

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funding an array of joint stock companies and buying up estates all over Ireland, the Chesapeake, and the Caribbean.27 Their wealth as well as their revolutionary service certainly made the Coleman Street elite welcome within the new puritan establishment. Following Pride’s Purge, Hildesley, Taylor, Russell, Noell, and Rowe regained the seats on the city militia that the Presbyterians had reformed in their own purge of London government. They served on the reconstituted militia committee next to other merchant saints, including the slave trader Rowland Wilson, who like Rowe had been appointed a colonel in the London trained bands. All of these men, along with the Coleman Streeter Thomas Barnardiston, a former member of the Providence Island Company, and William Pennoyer, a London saint who like Wilson had emerged as one of the city’s most active slave traders, served on London’s Common Council. According to the historian James Farnell, Rowe, Russell, Taylor, Hildesley, and Lacy, all of Coleman Street, along with Pennoyer, numbered among the circle of seventeen saints who controlled city politics. As the Venetian ambassador noted at this time, “[T]he facility with which the English increased their fortunes by trade . . . is now improved by the protection it receives from Parliament, the government of the Commonwealth and that of its trade being exercised by the same individuals.”28 The investments that these merchant-revolutionaries made in English colonization paid handsome dividends during the Interregnum, when voluntary migration to the colonies had sharply declined. The demand for unfree labor, in contrast, simultaneously increased, due in part to the expansion of tobacco cultivation in the Chesapeake, but more directly to the advent of profitable sugar production in the Caribbean. Consequently, as the historian Carla Gardina Pestana has written, during the 1640s and 1650s, coercion and deception became the main means by which planters acquired unfree labor—not just from Africa but from Britain and Ireland as well. The revolutionary state, and the Coleman Streeters who served it, played an important part in this process, refining and profiting from the system by which the government forcibly transported the poorest and most unruly elements within the commonality to the colonies. For instance, Owen Rowe, Isaac Pennington, Thomas Wroth, James Russell, Martin Noell, and William Allen received appointments to Parliament’s committees on poor relief and colonial affairs, which coordinated the imprisonment, transportation, and commodification of “felons,” “vagrants” and other “wandering . . . idle [and] dissolute” persons. The system these men refined destined those without homes and others convicted of crimes to bondage, and too

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often an early death, on plantations “beyond the seas.” As discussed in the first chapter with the case of young Walter Hill, English governments had issued laws and ordinances since the early seventeenth century sanctioning the transportation of the poor, both criminal and noncriminal, to work on colonial plantations; the colonial committees of the Council of State and the Long, Rump, and Protectorate Parliaments took the precedent to new levels, passing more transportation ordinances than had their predecessors at Westminster and Whitehall. They also extended the scope of transportation to pirates not in the state’s employ, English and Scots supporters of the king, and Irish Catholic “tories” and their sympathizers.29 Martin Noell accomplished more than any Coleman Streeter and indeed any Englishman of his day by using his sway within the government to profit as a human trafficker; indeed, through his influence as a civil servant, government financier, and colonial capitalist, Noell helped design the unfree labor regime that came to mark colonial life in the seventeenth-century English Atlantic. Before and during his time as a director of the East India Company in the late 1650s, Noell worked with Maurice Thomson and James Russell of Coleman Street to link East Indian commerce with the African slave trade and the West Indian plantation complex. But while he served in these various capacities, Noell wedded poor relief to private enterprise through the transatlantic trade in human beings along with Captain Thomas Alderne, a member of Goodwin’s church. Alderne, Owen Rowe’s son-inlaw, had served an apprenticeship with James Russell, placing him in an excellent position to cash in on the spoils of the merchant revolutionaries. William Davenish, who joined Alderne in Goodwin’s congregation, served as keeper of Winchester jail, from where he arranged the shipment of inmates to colonial plantations, most probably through Noell and Alderne. Noell and Alderne also negotiated contracts to transport Irish Catholics, royalist prisoners of war from England and Scotland, and, now and then, a motley crew of pirates unfortunate enough to land in an English jail. These disparate groups shared few things in common, but two of them were very significant: they were considered masterless or seditious, and therefore eligible for transportation to the colonies.30 Coleman Street’s Revolutionary merchants enriched themselves through their service to the state in a variety of ways. Noell became a “compounder of delinquents,” one of the officials who collected the fines that royalists paid to recover their sequestered estates. Russell worked on a scheme to overhaul the national assessment, which culminated in Parliament’s creation of the Committee for the Advance of Money in 1650. Owen Rowe,

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Mark Hildesley, Daniel Taylor, and Rowland Wilson supplemented their mercantile and manufacturing incomes as trustees of dean and chapter lands. Hanserd Knollys, that erstwhile champion of the mean and humble, made a living collecting the excise taxes that many of his poorer congregants, as Levellers, had tried to abolish. In this capacity and as a collector of customs duties, Knollys worked directly under Noell. In the early 1650s, Noell widened his pull as a tax collector to skim revenue from excises, estates, and customs, which only increased his leverage over policy making by the Council of State. Rowe also took in customs payments with Noell and Knollys. Further, Knollys worked as a clerk in the exchequer, or treasury office, though his autobiography alleges that he remained a poor schoolteacher throughout his life. Noell probably received more contracts to provision the navy and army than any other London merchant; these deals, arranged in part thanks to Alderne’s influence in the navy, involved the supply of guns, swords, uniforms, shoes, horses, and foodstuffs. In this capacity Noell did business with Rowe, who had charge over the munitions stored for the military’s use in the Tower of London. The republican navy also counted on Thomson, Rowe, Hildesley, and Taylor to assess the value and process the distribution of the captured loot that was streaming into the navy’s prize office. Emulating a long tradition left by their predecessors in all the positions and offices identified above, these hot-gospeling saints did not leave themselves unrewarded for their efforts but increased their private fortunes with public monies.31 C om m e nc i n g with the invasion of Ireland in 1649, the young republic set about transforming long-standing designs for an English empire in the Atlantic into concrete policy. To advance this agenda, Parliament passed three major bills between 1650 and 1652, the Settlement of Ireland Act, the Plantation Act, and the Navigation Act. Collectively, this legislation empowered Parliament and the Council of State to use force to seize the land and mobilize the labor necessary to begin the process of empire-building in earnest. Irish tories would be killed or shipped to the colonies as unfree labor, with the remaining Catholic population uprooted and “transplanted” west of the Shannon to speed the colonization of Ireland. Commonwealth fleets dispatched across the sea would force recalcitrant royalists in the Chesapeake and West Indies to recognize the republic. Poor or seditious people from Britain would be shipped to the Americas to supply planters with unfree labor. In another effort to secure unfree plantation labor for the Atlantic colonies, the revolutionary state also encouraged the African slave trade, a

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commerce that calculated the deaths that occurred on every voyage as the price of doing business. Via press gangs, force would also be used to acquire unfree military labor, usually in the form of very poor boys and young men who would be deployed for tours in Ireland, the West Indies, France, the Iberian Atlantic, and the Mediterranean. These imperial programs would commence in the name of English liberty and the progress of the Protestant Reformation, with little reference from the top to the violence and stolen liberty that made them possible. The carnage turned the dreams of the period’s most radical political visionaries into nightmares. Hundreds of thousands would eventually perish as a result of the commonwealth’s imperial turn, providing the best measure of what the late Christopher Hill called “the experience of defeat” in the English Revolution.32 The republic’s empire-building initiatives signaled a scale of colonial intervention unprecedented in English history. Although both crown and Parliament under the early Stuarts had shown the inclination to exercise direct authority over the colonies, the new English Republic did not inherent a well-ordered empire; indeed, at the dawn of the Interregnum, England’s virtually autonomous colonies constituted an empire in name only. In light of this situation, the revolutionaries now ensconced at Whitehall and Westminster, many of them having invested in colonial enterprises, understood better than anybody else in England how colonies could provide the commonwealth with the revenue, economic resources, markets, and military bases necessary to secure England against its Continental enemies and the threat of resurgent royalism. As a primary locus for the generation of national wealth, colonies translated the accumulation of economic capital into increased political capital and, hopefully, a competitive advantage against European rivals. Stemming in part from over half a century of colonization and commercial expansion, the commonwealth’s existing economic resources first put English empire-building on a sure footing in Ireland. The vote of thanks the committee dealing with Irish affairs gave to one of the Rump’s most commanding figures, Sir Henry Vane, in 1651 illustrates the point well: “[W]e acknowledge ourselves exceedingly obliged unto you for your respect to us and great care in promoting the affairs of Ireland, especially in that of money, without which the service here would be at a stand.” This note of gratitude indicates the strength of England’s private financial resources as well as Vane’s skill in securing them for the conquest of Ireland. As Irish historians have noted, the Irish conquest owed less to the New Model Army’s legendary prowess and more to Parliament’s capacity to provide it with enough

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funds to outlast the cash-strapped but militarily able tory insurgency. For its part, through the Act of Settlement for Ireland (1652), the Rump planned to confiscate most of the land held by Catholics, targeting any who could be said to have supported in any way either the 1641 rebellion or the resistance to the Cromwellian invasion. Draconian legislation of this sort became necessary to justify the Rump’s ultimate aim regarding Ireland, the outright expropriation of the majority of Catholic land, something previous English governments had never attempted. Perhaps the most impressive measure of the Rump’s determination in this regard lay in replacing Oliver Cromwell, the absentee governor general of Ireland, with more ruthless officers who would exercise command from Dublin Castle.33 The ultimate responsibility for the conquest and colonization of Ireland lies less with Cromwell, the legendary villain, and more with the Rump Parliament led by Vane, the Irish governors and commissioners in Ireland, Cromwell’s successors in the army high command in Ireland, and England’s merchant revolutionaries. Reminiscent of the Hartford Treaty’s (1638) political annihilation of the Pequot people and the subsequent clearance of their land in the Connecticut River Valley for colonization, the 1652 settlement and subsequent ordinances by Parliament and the Council of State justified a large-scale redistribution of Irish lands from mostly Catholic natives to soldiers and godly settlers. Catholics, both landowners and tenants, would be “transplanted” to the stony outlands of Connaught. Although the transplantation scheme fell short of all of its architects’ ambitions, English investors still made a lot of money by gaining land cleared through the transplantation of hundreds of thousands of Irish Catholics. The Leveller William Rainsborough and Coleman Street merchant revolutionaries such as James Russell, Thomas Barnardiston, Isaac Pennington, Samuel Avery, and Owen Rowe cashed in, taking out large shares in the Irish Adventurers’ company while presiding over various parliamentary committees charged with allotting Irish Catholic land. Within the ranks of the ward’s elite, Martin Noell probably profited most from the Irish settlement. Noell became a large property owner in County Wexford, where he held the deed to two hundred homes valued at £3697 in the town of Wexford alone. Fish were Ireland’s most lucrative export commodity, and Wexford’s port figured as the largest in this industry; Noell got control over it, which made the merchant’s ownership of the English salt excise and his domination of the saltmaking industry, where he employed over a thousand workers, even more lucrative. Noell subsequently multiplied his earnings by exporting salted fish from Britain and Ireland to West Indian plantations, where most of

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it was consumed by African slaves and bond slaves from Britain and Ireland. Perhaps he shipped fish to his own estates in Barbados and Montserrat (and later Jamaica) to further widen his profit margin. We know for sure that Noell made money shipping tories, their supporters, and other Catholics made destitute by the conquest into plantation bondage. By 1658, these ventures proved so successful that Noell informed a correspondent that he had “transplanted much of my interest, and affairs, and relations into Ireland.”34 Although Ireland was supposed to have been the place from which Charles II invaded England, the aspiring monarch actually did so from Scotland, which, like Virginia, Maryland, Barbados, St. Kitts, and Antigua, had proclaimed him king. Faced with a transatlantic challenge to its sovereignty, Parliament now had to divide its attention between the royalist army massing on the northern border and the insurgent royalism roiling through its American dominions. Although the United Colonies in New England had all accepted the legitimacy of the revolutionary regime, the Chesapeake and island colonies viewed the regicide with horror and the republican regime at Westminster as a usurping abomination waging war on property, Protestant orthodoxy, and social propriety. Royalists in Bermuda, having banished Independents during the religious turmoil of the 1640s, did so again in 1649, consolidating their political position against planters friendly to England’s puritan government. In Virginia, Governor Berkeley exiled puritans who had settled in Upper Norfolk and Nansemond Counties. He also promised the mostly royalist planters under his authority, whose ranks had been supplemented by recent émigrés from England, that they would violently resist any attempt by Parliament to coerce them into submission. For a time Berkeley even seems to have considered inviting Charles II to reside in exile in Virginia, a plan that if successful would have produced a sea change in the politics of the revolutionary Atlantic.35 On Barbados, royalism made the most sense to planters terrified by the potential of being mastered by their own slaves in a slave society ruptured by the English Revolution. Historians of slave societies have likened the relationship between masters and slaves to perpetual low-grade warfare. Slaves saw opportunity in their masters’ vulnerability and often seized upon crises within the master class to rise up. Living in such a potentially combustible environment, Royalist planters felt that any disruption to the disciplinary regime of the plantation threatened their own liberty as well as their very lives. They thus associated their potential mastery by an English regime of king-killing heretics with the possibility that they and their

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wives might be mastered by a combination of their African slaves and European servants. The Rump’s supporters on Barbados sought to avoid this nightmare scenario as much as the royalists who banished them from the island. Fleeing to Old England to find allies to assist in the restoration of their sequestered estates and offices, the Barbadians in exile created another cycle of circum-Atlantic mobility generated by a colonial political crisis. In London, the Barbados planter Nicholas Foster proved the most skilled publicist for the cause of his dispossessed cohort, publishing A Brief Relation of the Late Horrid Rebellion Acted in the Island of Barbados. Two of the republic’s most notable merchant-revolutionaries, Martin Noell and Maurice Thomson, rewarded Foster’s efforts by using their considerable sway to advance his cause at Westminster.36 Influenced by the counsel of such key merchant-revolutionaries, Parliament passed the Plantation Act of 1650. The act proclaimed Parliament’s sovereignty over England’s Atlantic colonies, a sweeping innovation that gave it the right to determine, approve, and suspend the laws and charters of colonial government—a truly imperial overture by which the English state broadcast its plans to involve itself in colonial affairs more deeply than had any previous Parliament. While New Englanders continued to give the revolutionary government at least lukewarm support, slaveholding royalists in the West Indies and the Chesapeake protested against the “slavish life” that the Plantation Act had allegedly imposed upon them. West Indian colonists also proclaimed their determination to “protect . . . with our utmost force” the “foreign merchants” (mostly Dutch) whose trade, particularly in slaves, figured crucially in the economic prospects of colonial planters, none more so than those who had turned to sugar production. In regard to the royalist coup on Bermuda, Owen Rowe took a page from the book of his in-law the earl of Warwick, and sought Parliament’s permission to raise a privateer fleet to subdue the island’s royalists, who had taken over the tobacco trade on the island that the Coleman Streeter had invested in throughout his career. Parliament, however, had more far-reaching plans for Bermuda and all the recalcitrant royalists of the English Atlantic.37 In the late summer and early fall of 1651, with monies gleaned from the sale of Archbishop Laud’s estates, the Rump Parliament deployed two naval squadrons across the Atlantic to subdue royalist diehards in the Chesapeake and the West Indies. Thirteen ships commanded by Sir George Ayescue sailed for the West Indies accompanied by a set of civilian commissioners led by the merchant Maurice Thomson. Ayescue seized foreign ships when he first arrived on Barbados, but he learned soon thereafter that Parlia-

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ment’s writ ran only as far as his cannon could fire. As the admiral discovered, and as his imperialist heirs would come to understand over the course of the next century, colonists would largely determine the efficacy of imperial law “beyond the seas.” Colonists considered themselves, as freeborn Englishmen in America, the equals of the men in Parliament and the Council of State. On Barbados, for instance, the colonists simply refused to accept English state sovereignty, at least in matters of trade, even when faced by an English fleet. Bermuda proved problematic as well, and the island’s absentee deputy governor, the Coleman Street militant Owen Rowe, would find that his title did not translate into effectual power on the ground; his directives were rarely carried out.38 When another English fleet of fifteen ships commanded by Captain Robert Denis appeared off the Virginia coast in early 1652, Governor William Berkeley urged the colonists to resist and, in a reference to the merchant-revolutionary cadre associated with Noell and Thomson, warned of “a company of merchants who would order them at pleasure and keep them from trade with all others.” Berkeley’s warning hardly amounted to hysteria. Many Virginians would have been quite familiar with Thomson, as he and Captain William Tucker had lived in Virginia in the 1620s and 1630s and had even managed for a time to corner the Chesapeake tobacco market. Thomson also figured, as Governor Berkeley knew, as a dependable trading partner of the godly Richard Bennett, one of the few men of this persuasion in Virginia whose political ambitions matched those of Berkeley himself. In the end, although Berkeley promised to spill blood to defend the king and the ancient constitution in Virginia, his bark proved worse than his bite. When the Virginia militia refused to engage the commonwealth’s expeditionary force, Berkeley’s puritan adversary Bennett ended up conducting Virginia’s peaceful submission, an effort that earned him the governor’s seat for the next five years.39 Having dispatched an invasion force to Ireland and two fleets to the colonies to enforce its sovereignty around the English Atlantic, the Rump next took bold steps through the first Navigation Act (1651) to organize the country’s political economy of empire. Strongly influenced by the counsel of Maurice Thomson, the legislation outlawed European competition in the New England, Chesapeake, and Caribbean colonies and created a circumscribed imperial commercial zone that reconfigured the colonies as a captive export market for English textiles and manufactured goods. As the first comprehensive set of mercantile regulations levied upon the colonies, the Navigation Act aimed at fostering an Atlantic empire to help England accumulate the political and economic power necessary to compete with

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its chief commercial rival, the Dutch, in European and colonial markets. The supporters of the Navigation Act in England lauded the “free trade” it afforded the country’s merchants, as it allowed them to ignore the monopolies chartered through the royal prerogative. Noell, Thomson, and their merchant circle, long forced by company monopolies to “interlope” or trade illegally in foreign markets, saw economic opportunity in free trade. These revolutionary merchants, moreover, adopted the mercantilist view that an imperial commercial zone, regulated by excise and customs taxes, open to all English and English colonial merchants but closed off to foreign competition, would enhance the wealth of the nation. The political economy of early modern England clearly sought to put capitalist innovation in the service of the state, growing the power of the commonwealth by increasing the capacity for private persons to generate economic wealth as efficiently as possible. The royalist planters in the colonies, however, had a different view of the revolutionary government’s commercial policies. Although capitalists themselves, they looked upon the Plantation and Navigation Acts as the height of corruption, driven by the particular interests of London merchants and not the combined, common good of the mother country and the colonies. Such corruption, in the planters’ view, also bred tyranny, for it politically “enslaved” colonists to an arbitrary power that impoverished the king’s loyal subjects in the colonies by prohibiting commerce with slavetrading Dutch merchants. With revolutionaries and colonial royalists rallying around their own distinct concepts of “free trade,” the controversy surrounding the Navigation Acts illustrates how the idea had yet to acquire a set definition in the seventeenth century.40 Rife with the language of liberty and slavery so prevalent in the political discourse of the English Revolution, the debate over free trade in the early English empire generated another conflict between freedom and slavery, this one more physical than rhetorical. Importantly, unincorporated English merchants found that the government’s free trade policies meant greater access to the slave trade, as the commercial liberty from monopolies they gained under the Navigation Act allowed them freer scope to pursue profits in the business of purchasing, transporting, and selling people into colonial slavery. The act, at least ostensibly, ended foreign competition for the slave trade to England’s colonies, while it allowed more English merchants to legally (and thus with less risk to profits) compete with England’s Guinea and East India Companies, each of which trafficked in slaves. As the Barbados historian Larry Gragg has noted, shortly following the passage of the Navigation Acts, the English eclipsed the Dutch as the island’s most

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prolific suppliers of African slaves, with at least seventy five English slavers plying their trade on the Gold Coast in the mid-1650s. By 1659, a Dutch bureaucrat living in the Bight of Benin recorded his wonder at the “endless number of [English] slavers” sailing there to buy slaves. England’s spectacular rise as a maritime commercial power, fueled by policies like the Navigation Act, did much to inform the mythology of English exceptionalism, which holds that unlike other world powers, the English, as a “polite and commercial people,” built their empire through maritime trade and a strong navy charged with its protection. England’s most lucrative commerce, however, would come from the slave trade, where violence, terror, and death remained indispensable to profits. Death, it must be understood, figured literally in the calculus of slave-trading profitability: merchants expected that a significant portion of their “cargo” would perish in the Middle Passage. By the mid-1650s, mostly English ships were delivering two thousand slaves annually to Barbados; by the end of the decade, “negro” slaves outnumbered bond slaves from Britain and Ireland on the island. Thus was sugar production in the English Atlantic linked to England’s birth as a “plantation empire,” one that later in the seventeenth century would become absolutely dependent upon the labor of enslaved Africans.41 The Mendi, Mandingo, Fulani, and other African peoples enslaved by English merchants and planters, however, did not regard their captors as a polite and commercial people, nor did they subscribe to the principles of English political economy that held up “free trade” in African slaves as a means to greater liberty and prosperity. Africans regarded their captors as tyrants who had stolen their bodily liberty; accordingly, when opportunity presented itself, and perhaps more often when they created their own opportunities, the enslaved rebelled, as a slave ship captain on the River Gambia discovered in 1651 when, rather than face death at the hands of his African captives, he blew up his vessel, taking his own life and all those aboard. Three years later, Captain Thomas Hiway and his crew ended up killing forty of the sixty slaves aboard his ship when they rebelled on a voyage from the Senegambia to Barbados in 1654. But the enslaved did not restrict their resistance to slave ships; they struggled for liberty on plantations, some of the most violent and terroristic enclaves in the empire. There, on the estates where their master tried to force them to work, enslaved Africans refused to work; they also ran away, burned crops, broke tools, and fought back against overseers and masters, sometimes killing them. On Barbados and Bermuda, African slaves and Irish bond slaves conspired to rise up in 1649, 1656, and 1659, although on each occasion the planters

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discovered their plans via informers and executed the insurgents in brutal displays of exemplary terror. Free trade discourse aimed at liberating merchants from political slavery; at the same time, it promoted a form of political liberty based on economic slavery. But resistance to slavery, led largely by Africans, also reveals how the Atlantic commonality in its first, formative years defined its own principles of liberty. Ultimately, the most compelling freedom story relating to the rise of the English empire lay not in the languages and ideologies of free trade but in how people fought back against being enslaved or otherwise destroyed as the empire spread through fire and sword on land and at sea. As the historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker have convincingly argued in their book The Many-Headed Hydra, the “cycle of rebellion” initiated by unfree workers and “commoners” from Africa, Europe, and the Americas during the age of the English Revolution fostered an upside-down tradition of popular resistance that became an endemic, destabilizing feature of the English empire, whose allegedly peaceable trade would claim millions of lives.42 S u rv e y i n g England’s prospects for empire in 1654, the regicide Thomas Scot declared that the English people were poised to become “masters of the whole world.” Although certainly exaggerated, Scot’s boast signaled the confidence of England’s republicans as they crossed the threshold from European backwater to imperial power. But while England’s ascent at this point owed much to Cromwell’s army, Vane’s navy had also brightened the commonwealth’s imperial fortunes. After the regicide, Vane, who had long served as a naval administrator, had adeptly managed the buildup of England’s navy during the first Anglo-Dutch War (1652–54). The result of the republic’s diplomatic failure to unite with the Dutch in a militant Protestant commercial empire, the war ended in a victory for the English, though a costly one in terms of money and men.43 Vane’s success as a naval administrator, however, depended upon the assistance of a naval commission dominated by a host of former New Englanders. Nehemiah Bourne figured as Vane’s most important appointment to the commission. Bourne had immigrated to America on a ship owned by Captain William Rainsborough, father of the Levellers William and Thomas. In Charleston, Massachusetts, Bourne worked as a shipbuilder, served in the militia, and petitioned for liberty of conscience before returning to England to serve in the New Model Army under Thomas Rainsborough. Like Rainsborough, Bourne left the army to become one of the revolutionary navy’s most skilled commanders; he also owned a shipyard in London that contracted with New England

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merchants involved in the timber trade. Maurice Thomson’s brother Robert, another former New Englander who had been involved in the fishing and timber trades in America, also joined the naval commission at Vane’s behest. The Coleman Streeter Edward Hopkins did as well. He returned to London in 1652, having served, as we already know, as a founder of the United Colonies and many terms as the governor of Connecticut. The revolutionary government rewarded Hopkins with another plum position, the keeper of the Fleet Prison, the insides of which saints from Samuel How to John Lilburne had come to know very well, not to mention the impoverished, now anonymous people who experienced the Fleet as kind of a way station before their transportation to colonial plantations.44 Vane and his fellow New Englanders on the naval commission committed the country to far-reaching naval reform; most crucially, the commissioners, with Parliament’s support, found the necessary funds through loans and taxation to effectively finance the expansion of the fleet. Reform necessitated a shakeup of the officer corps, the mobilization of tens of thousands of more sailors, and the improvement of conditions under which they would work. Vane and the commission set about these tasks by promoting talented and loyal commanders such as Admirals John Lawson and George Blake and by quadrupling the number of men under sail. At least on paper, sailors enjoyed a pay raise, healthier victuals, and more reliable medical provisions. The commission also codified shipboard discipline to restrain the arbitrary violence that officers so often visited upon their charges. When the army-dominated Council of State made a hash out of the first phase of the Dutch war, Parliament placed Vane and his commission in exclusive charge of the effort, laying the foundation for England’s victory in early 1654. Having led in the effort to remodel the army, Vane did the same for the navy with the help of a cadre of former colonists; as a result, by the mid-seventeenth century, the former colonial governor had equipped England with a blue-water fleet capable of making the country an imperial power broker.45 But the history of English empire-building gets more complicated when we seriously consider its often hidden labor history. While Vane and his commission of returned colonists always found the money to finance the fighting on the North Atlantic, they never seemed to come up with enough money to pay the fighters. Vane certainly did not begin the practice, but he continued it, and in his time and for a long time afterward, stinting sailors on their pay made it cost effective for Britannia to rule the waves. Moreover, in contrast to the Agreement of the People and in contrast to the Dutch

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navy, which had abolished the practice, Vane’s navy continued to impress sailors on a large scale. The historian Bernard Capp’s research has shown that naval conscription for the Dutch War, the Western Design, and other deployments, principally against Spain, added an average of ten thousand men to the fleet every year between 1652 and 1655, growing the navy from a force of ten to forty thousand. The press was simply more efficient in filling the ranks than were raises in pay, which, given the difficulty sailors had in recovering their wages, were worth less than the paper upon which they had been ordered. Coercion—rather than patriotism or even the quest to eke a living out at sea—made the crucial difference in securing the labor that made possible the republic’s rise as a naval power. Many sailors, not surprisingly, found this state of affairs intolerable, and in the spring of 1653, in the midst of England’s first naval war with the Dutch, hundreds of them rioted on Tower Hill before bringing their case in armed fashion to Parliament itself, demonstrating on the same cobbled pavement at Westminster where sailors had joined the revolutionary crowds in December 1641.46 The Rump Parliament’s war against the Dutch did command considerable support, however, from godly small producers and tradesmen looking to traffic in the Hollanders’ foreign markets; but these saints were also rediscovering their militant Protestantism in ways that cost the Rump their backing. Many in the “honest party” were weary with the Rump’s lackluster performance in the way of godly reform and frustrated by the fact that the country had not held a parliamentary election since 1640. They also grew increasingly nervous about the £700,000 debt that the Rump had racked up through its imperial ventures in Ireland and on the seas against the Dutch. Oliver Cromwell’s friendship with the Rump’s leading force, Henry Vane, became increasingly strained within this context, and on April 20, 1653, the general decided to take action. Leading a file of soldiers into the House of Commons, Cromwell dissolved the Rump Parliament. Rising to his feet, Sir Henry shouted at the general, “This is not honest; yea, it is against morality and common honesty!” Cromwell, having reached his wits’ end with his former friend, replied, “O Sir Henry Vane! Sir Henry Vane! The Lord deliver me from Sir Henry Vane!” He then called Vane a “juggler,” a contemporary term for a cunning politician, and insulted him further by claiming that Vane himself had no “common honesty.”47 Unlike the late king, Cromwell succeeded in his invasion of the House of Commons and dissolved the Rump Parliament. The saints of the gathered churches rallied around the Rump’s successor, the Nominated Assembly. They were encouraged by Cromwell and the

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Council of State to see the new Parliament, nicknamed the Barebones Assembly after one of its more memorably named members, Praisegod Barebones, as an instrument of millennial redemption, designed to fulfill the apocalyptic expectations generated by the reformation work of the Revolution. The Assembly aspired to abolish all “antichristian yokes” in order to usher in a sacred age when Christ would rule with the saints on earth, either in the spirit or in his actual person. This millenarian vision had become the cri de coeur for the New Model Army in its campaign to vanquish the army of Charles II in Scotland. At the outset of the venture in August 1650, the New Model reaffirmed the republican principles of the 1647 army engagements through a millenarian vow, declaring that since they were no mere mercenary army, they would serve no king but Jesus, who would effect “the destruction of antichrist and the deliverance of his church and people.” “We beseech you,” wrote the millenarian preacher John Rogers to the Assembly, “to hearken to the inexorable cries of the commonality for justice,” which could be achieved only through a “Republic” based on “the laws of God given by Moses.”48 While the Mosaic Code, drafted into intelligible form first by John Cotton in the Bay Colony, could lead to hyperprerogative forms of government, as it had in John Davenport’s New Haven, it also figured importantly within a strain of transatlantic republicanism that found a ready host in the Barebones Parliament. In the eyes of its most radical members, the laws of Moses served as the source of political sovereignty that guarded against “carnal” innovations in law and government, particularly the arbitrary powers claimed by magistrates that usurped the sovereignty of King Jesus and his royal law. The Bay Colonist and antinomian seditionist William Aspinwall made an important contribution to this line of political thought when he introduced John Cotton’s work on the Mosaic Code, via the Coleman Street printer Livewell Chapman, to the Interregnum debate over godly reform in Old England. Aspinwall, who returned to England in 1651, held out hope with other extreme millenarians that legal reform conducted according to the word and spirit of the Mosaic Code would hasten the “Fifth Monarchy.” This curious phrase derived from the book of Daniel, where prophecies foretold the destruction of the four historical monarchies (usually read as the Median, Persian, Greek and Roman Empires) that had given Antichrist dominion over the earth. The Fifth Monarchy, or the empire of Christ and his saints, would begin in England, with the saints purging antichristian instruments from earthly institutions to remodel state and society according to scriptural precedent. The ultimate end lay in restoring the sovereignty

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of King Jesus, according to his royal law, in a biblical commonwealth that would advance the Protestant Reformation around the world.49 When Cromwell convened the Nominated Assembly, his apocalyptic charisma got the better of his gentry conservatism; his opening address positively gushed with enthusiasm for millennial reform. Urging the members to “endeavor” to fulfill the apocalyptic prophecies in the book of Daniel, Cromwell “confess[ed]” that the Assembly “may be the door to usher in the things that God has promised.” Millenarians in the Assembly took Cromwell at his word, proposing a slew of legal and social reforms including a more extensive system of poor relief; the repeal of tithes and excise taxes; the end of courts, procedures, and fees that kept the poor from seeking and receiving justice; and the abolition of capital punishment and transportation for theft in favor of restitution. Despite Cromwell’s past history as an advocate for legal reform favoring the poor, the threat the Assembly’s practical Christian measures posed to the interests of property worried the general and his allies on the Council of State, haunted as they were by the Levelling ghosts of 1646–49. With Cromwell’s support, a clique of members opposed to such thoroughgoing reform dissolved the Nominated Assembly in December 1653 after it had sat for less than five months.50 Later that December, the Council of State proclaimed Oliver Cromwell lord protector of Great Britain and Ireland for life and proclaimed the Instrument of Government Act. The Instrument, which still stands as the English state’s only written constitution, was drafted in secret by General John Lambert, imposed upon the country without parliamentary consent, and first ratified in practice by the point of the sword. Critically, the Instrument granted the lord protector a final veto, thus endowing Cromwell with a “negative voice” and control over the nation’s armed forces, two forms of prerogative power that had antagonized republicans in Old and New England for over a decade. Many of his former comrades looked with suspicion on the trappings of royalty that gilded Cromwell’s installation as lord protector in January 1654. This should not surprise. In the coronation ceremony, the fenland squire was proclaimed sovereign for life in a flowing train of ermine robes tended by the earl of Warwick. With the establishment of the Protectorate and the reentrenchment of prerogative institutions in English political life, the end had come for the short-lived English Republic but not, as the lord protector made sure, its ambitions for an Atlantic empire.51 Wi t h the advent of the Protectorate, the English Commonwealth reached what the historian David Armitage has called an “imperial moment,” testing

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whether the commonwealth principles of the Revolution could withstand the potentially corrupting effects of empire-building. According to philosophers of antiquity and the Renaissance, corruption erodes the integrity of a republic when its governors wage self-interested wars of colonial conquest at the expense of the public good, “enslaving the people to their own lusts” and paving the way for the tyrannical rule of emperors, who destroy republican institutions to aggrandize their own power. But the arrogance of Oliver Cromwell and his most steadfast supporters within the powerful circles of the Protectorate elite led them to believe that God had predestined England, as his apocalyptic instrument, to remake the world in its own godly image. The lessons of republican history, therefore, did not apply to England. Apocalyptic dispensation made humankind’s natural corruption and even the vagaries of outrageous fortune irrelevant; the virtue of the saints, obtained by the grace of God and guided by the hand of providence, would lead them into an empire of increase and godly liberty that would bring about the end of profane history. England would revel and glory in its millennial moment, redeeming the world from Antichrist to fulfill the apocalyptic script of Reformation history.52 Taking up the righteous man’s burden, the lord protector concluded that an English invasion of the Spanish Caribbean would carry out “the work . . . in the world” that God intended for the saints. Moreover, Cromwell remarked, “the work is like to be more acceptable to the people of all sorts and the Parliament than any can be,” since good English Protestants could all unite against the “common enemy,” Catholic Spain. Cromwell informed the Council of State in the spring of 1654 that his ambitions in the West Indies involved a full-scale project of conquest and colonization to supplant Spain as the region’s dominant power.53 While planning what came to be called the Western Design, Cromwell, an avid reader of the account of Walter Raleigh’s exploits in the West Indies, listened intently to the advice of merchant-revolutionaries with colonial interests, including a number of colonists who had actually returned to England. Indeed, contemporaries reported on the “extraordinary favor” Martin Noell enjoyed with Cromwell; they also described Maurice Thomson as an “intimate” of the protector. At this point Thomas Gage, a renegade priest who had ministered all over the Spanish Atlantic during the 1630s, also entered the protector’s inner circle. Referring to Gage, the Venetian ambassador wrote that the “many secret conferences” the “Dominican friar” had with the protector did much to inspire the design against the West Indies. In 1648, Gage had published The English-American: A New Survey of the West Indies, pointing out Spanish naval

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and military weaknesses to argue that Cuba and Hispaniola could be taken at little expense. In March 1654, the former priest composed a position paper for Cromwell, most likely at the latter’s invitation, that cast England’s expansionist ambitions as just revenge for Spanish attacks against the English in the West Indies. Gage also made much of the Black Legend, the grim tales of Spain’s depredations against Native Americans, conveniently ignoring the abuses that the English had visited upon “savages” in Ireland, Africa, and the Americas. Indeed, in the 1650s English presses began reprinting the works by De las Casas and Campanello that had first given rise to the Black Legend. These books as well as Gage’s input influenced the official justification of the expedition, sometimes attributed to John Milton, that the regime published after the fleet’s departure. The tract proclaimed that England’s cause in the Caribbean represented the cause of mankind, as “all great and extraordinary wrongs done to particular persons ought to be considered as in a manner done to all the rest of the human race.”54 Capturing Hispaniola, a “country beyond compare,” as the protector told the Council of State, would give England “command of the Spaniard’s fleet” in the Caribbean so “that he can neither come nor go.” The protector meant that by capturing Hispaniola and reconverting it into an English naval and pirate base, England could box in the Spanish plate fleet, preventing it from making its way back to Spain laden with bullion from its South and Central American mines. That May, Cromwell endorsed letters of marque for merchant ship captains to engage in piracy against the Spanish. But more than pillage for imperial increase, the invasion itself would ultimately, as Cromwell had it, “gain ground” in the Spaniards’ Caribbean dominion and perhaps on the Spanish Main itself. The protector observed that by wresting colonies away from Spain, England could begin the process of “transplanting as much of our people from New England, Virginia, the Barbados, the Summer Islands, or from Europe, as we see requisite.” The state would subsidize the removal of colonists from their former homes while providing them with land grants on Hispaniola and other conquered colonies in the Caribbean, precisely where merchant-revolutionaries aimed to expand the English plantation complex. Nobody on the Council of State or in the armed forces officer corps seems to have questioned that England’s freedom would flow from the work of slave labor in the Caribbean. Indeed, as a group of Rhode Islanders had written in 1652, it had become “common course” among the English in the Americas to enslave “black mankind . . . forever.”55 The colonial vision underlying the Western Design comes into better

im age 6. John Thornton’s General Chart of the West Indies (1689) provides a wide view of the Atlantic world. The fleets of soldiers and sailors dispatched across the Atlantic by the revolutionaries in power at Whitehall and Westminster (ca. 1651–55) to subjugate Royalist colonists and conquer Spanish colonies marked the first armed attempts of any English government to bring England’s long-standing vision of a militant Protestant Atlantic empire to fruition. Photo courtesy of The Newberry Library (Map Room REF G1025 .T37 ser.4 v.1).

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focus when we note that Cromwell selected men with colonial experience to execute the expedition. General Robert Venables, whom Cromwell tapped to command the venture’s infantry forces, had impeccable imperial credentials. In the Irish conquest, he had helped lead the storming of Drogheda, joining in the bloodletting there with vigor while “other officers” were “refusing the employment.” Venables had gained further experience in the terrorism of colonial conquest in Ulster, where he directed the antipartisan war against the tories. These operations often ended with the summary execution or capture of Catholics, including civilians who had not taken up arms, who were then transported and enslaved on West Indian plantations. So much did Venables’s command of Irish colonial affairs impress Parliament that it tapped him to help draft the land expropriation clauses in the Settlement of Ireland Act.56 Venables thus became an imperial architect as well as a boots-on-the ground conquistador through his experience in the colonization of Ireland. Moving from the military to the political concerns of empire-building, Cromwell selected Edward Winslow to serve as a civilian commissioner, a position where Winslow could use his considerable political skills to handle the home government’s delicate relations with the prickly and fickle West Indian plantocracy. With a track record of published colonial apologetics stretching back to the 1620s, Winslow could readily provide propaganda from the West Indies should the godly image of the project come into question. Moreover, as a Mayflower migrant and a founding father of the United Colonies, Winslow seemed to personify the spirit of the Western Design, having once proclaimed that the colonies were a place where “religion and profit” could “jump together.” If profits and religion did not jump together throughout the English Atlantic entire, they certainly did for Winslow himself, for the government raised his annual salary to £1,000 for his services in the expedition. 57 While dreams of West Indian empire motivated the Western Design’s proponents, none of them could be realized without acquisition of the necessary military labor. But with wages still owed them for service against the Dutch, England’s seamen could hardly be expected to flock to the navy office on Tower Hill to reenlist. Compounding this problem, the regime made the fleet’s destination an official secret, hoping to keep the Spanish in the dark even as the massive force began mobilizing in English port cities over the spring, summer, and fall of 1654. Seamen would certainly have been skeptical about volunteering for such a mysterious and possibly deadly enterprise. The slave trader John Paige noted in May 1654 that “forty sail of men-of-war [were] now sheeted and [could] be ready within a month to

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proceed [with] their design.” Paige also concluded from the preparations made to the vessels and the supplies they carried that the fleet was “bound for the West Indies.” If the secret had slipped out as early as May 1654, sailors would have been even more reluctant to offer their services, since they had gathered from their working knowledge of the Atlantic that death by disease often made a voyage to the West Indies a one-way trip. As a result, the navy turned to the press gang. Gilbert Mammot noted in June 1654 that “great preparations are made for the design by sea by pressing of men.” In July, Mammot reported that press gangs, desperate for bodies, had begun forcing “land men” or nonsailors into the navy.58 The army also resorted to impressment to fill the ranks of the expedition’s infantry. General Venables ordered his officers to descend into the depths of London’s horrid prisons in search of boys and men to conscript. Even the troops Venables acquired from the New Model Army commanders were pressed soldiers who had proved troublesome during their service in Ireland. Captain Daniel How of Colonel Carter’s regiment wrote that most of the troops in the expedition were “apprentices that ran away from their masters, and others that came out of Bridewell, or one gaol or another.” As How’s remarks attest, all the men were not pressed out of the Irish garrison or London prisons; some were runaways whose desperation made them vulnerable to the trickery of recruiters holding out empty promises of pillage and glory. Being deceived into the ranks in this fashion can scarcely be described with precision as “volunteering” to serve. Far from devoted republicans on a mission to liberate “the heathen” from Spanish perfidy, according to both Venables and How the men were motivated by two things: fear of the gibbet and a desire for Caribbean plunder. Venables described the conscripts as “born to do mischief, not to be commanded as soldiers nor to be kept in any civil order, being the most prophane, debauched persons we ever saw.” The commonality within the ranks returned the generals’ compliment with action, not words. As noted at the outset of the chapter, the conscripts and runaways mutinied after coming to the conclusion that their abusive officers planned to sell them into slavery.59 The fleet set sail in December 1654 with thirty-eight ships and three thousand troops under the combined command of Admiral William Penn and General Venables. Dropping anchor in late January, Admiral Penn set about the immediate enforcement of the Navigation Act, confiscating eighty Dutch ships in Barbados that “traded there contrary to the late Parliament.” On Barbados, as well as on Nevis, St. Kitts, Antigua, and Montserrat, Venables resorted to both luring and pressing bond slaves from Britain into the

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infantry. Into the ranks would also fall many of the Irish whom Venables and other New Model officers had sent to the West Indies to labor in the sugar fields, much to their masters’ dismay. Lieutenant Colonel Barrington, from a family whose West Indian investments stretched back to the Providence Island project, recognized how the press on Barbados damaged the economic interests of the plantocracy, whose “whole estate lay in the good stock of servants.” In their “haste to press,” Barrington said, the officers “were guilty of ruining the estates of cooperative men” in ways that left them “to the mercy of their negros and other servants.”60 Venables, in contrast to Barrington, could not have cared less, dismissing the whining planters as a “company of geese”; the general’s most persistent concern, besides finding enough men, lay in finding enough arms and ammunition. In a report to the Protectorate, Venables wrote, “I did not know that we have raised 3000 [men] and [have] not arms for 1500 of them. Mr. Noell’s 1500 arms are found to be but 190”—remarks that testify to either incompetence or corruption on the part of Noell. Venables also observed that the fifteen rounds per man with which Noell had supplied the expedition was “a most inconsiderable proportion to have hunted tories in Ireland with.” Consequently, to finance the purchase of arms in the West Indies, Venables engaged in an impromptu flurry of slave trading. Under the auspices of the Navigation Act, Venables confiscated a hapless Dutch slave ship that had docked in Barbados. He sold the human beings from Africa he now claimed as state property to local planters “for about 5162.” While experience in Ireland educated Venables’s views on how to lead a colonial expedition, in the West Indies the Navigation Acts enabled the general to finance the conquest of the Spanish West Indies through the sale of enslaved Africans.61 The expedition shoved off for Hispaniola in mid-April and quickly met with serious setbacks. Morale plummeted first while the troops were still aboard ship; Winslow had waited till the fleet was under sail to announce that the protector had, upon pain of death, forbidden the men to engage in any pillaging or plundering. In addition to clothing, gold, silver, jewelry, or anything else of monetary value, soldiers were forbidden to touch the island’s cattle, fruit trees, sugar cane, sugar mills, cassava, and anything else tied to the economy of the cash crop plantation system. The order violated the soldiers’ customary right of conquest, which entitled them to the loot of a conquered foe. It left the men and their officers stunned, since the prospect of plunder had appeared to them as the mission’s most redeeming quality. Although the antiplunder ordinance shredded the men’s last hope that the expedition might be worthwhile, it did reflect the political economy of empire in striving to preserve the island’s economic infrastructure. In this

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way new planters would not waste time and money rebuilding a desolated colony. When the time came for the actual invasion of the island, Penn and Venables squabbled over tactics, dooming any chance that their disheartened soldiers might achieve a military victory. Abandoning his plan for a direct landing at Santo Domingo, Venables’s men washed up on a beach forty miles from the town. Exhaustion quickly overtook the troops, who had to force their way through churning rivers and dense tropical thickets. To make matters worse, the officers, with little knowledge of the unfamiliar terrain, had trouble finding their way through the woods, wasting precious time as well as the waning energy of their men.62 The officer Daniel How wrote that “all the loss we had at Hispaniola was occasioned . . . for want of arms, provisions, and . . . guides.” Venables complained that “we had bad bread, and little of it. . . . [The soldiers] therefore fell to eat limes, oranges and lemons, which gave them into fluxes and fevers.” Due to hunger, thirst, and the heat, “plague” and the “bloody flux” took a heavy toll on the men. Reporting from the front, Venables wrote that the weather was so hot that “our feet scorched through our shoes, and men and horses died of thirst.” Struggling through torrid forests along narrow, twisting tracks with an army of conscripted stragglers in tow, the general foolishly pressed local Irish and Africans to guide the army on its approach to Santo Domingo. This led inevitably to disaster. On April 16, 1655, an English-speaking African, perhaps a rover who had escaped from slavery on Barbados, led Colonel Buller into an ambush outside the island capital. The next day an English officer reported that an Irish guide commandeered on Hispaniola “gave us false intelligence, though we compelled him with us, which afterwards cost him his life.” Venables’s men killed their false Irish friend because he had led them into another ambush, this one being engineered by a “Coll. Murfy an Irishman on horseback, being in the head of the Spaniards.” When Murfy emerged from the wood and “waved a handkerchief,” the Hispaniola militia commenced their attack. At the head of the column, Murfy “brandished a broad fauchion” and led his troops on a withering assault on the English, driving them back in a panic through the woods, where they were trapped in confusion “without water” until midnight. Under Murfy’s leadership, Irishmen in the Caribbean had taken the opportunity to strike a blow against the government that had executed their priests, confiscated their land, driven them into exile, and sold them into a brutal life of bond slavery.63 Most of Murfy’s troops, however, did not hail from the emerald isle. He and the other commanders of the “Spanish” militia on the island presided over a motley but fearsome crew that consisted of Spanish soldiers, Spanish

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colonists, “negros” freed by the Spanish to fight the English, and men of African and European descent who had migrated to Hispaniola after escaping slavery and bond slavery in other West Indian colonies. Motley crews of this sort, later known as “buccaneers,”64 proved very effective in the jungle ambushes the Spanish militia launched against the English troops, many of whom as pressed men regarded their service to the state as a kind of slavery. Without room to maneuver on the jungle tracks that crisscrossed the island, the English made easy marks. They died terrible deaths, impaled on short lances that the Spanish militia had designed for combat in thickly wooded terrain. After being dealt a series of humiliating and terrifying defeats, Venables realized that his remaining troops were so fatigued, frightened, and discouraged that they were “scarce able . . . to stand.” He resolved to give up on Hispaniola, writing, “[O]ur ammunition spent [with] no water . . . the . . . heat of the fight had drawn [the soldiers] beyond their strength, whereupon it was resolved by a council of war to retreat.” Twenty days of fighting on Hispaniola had cost the English over one thousand men.65 After their miserable attempt on Hispaniola, Venables and Penn decided to light upon Jamaica, which the buccaneers would soon make their base of operations. But in June 1655, as the English splashed ashore on Jamaica under fire from a waterfront fortification, a Spanish soldier shouted above the din, asking the English troops why they had come. One of the invaders shouted back, “For fresh meat and pieces of eight.” It’s hard to imagine another exchange that better captures the hypocrisy of a mercenary expedition so cloaked in the robes of Protestant piety. Facing only token Spanish resistance, the English quickly established themselves on Jamaica. After unceremoniously dumping their men off on the island, Penn and Venables raced each other back to England, presumably to reach Cromwell first in order to blame the other for the expedition’s many disasters. Jamaica’s future as England’s richest colonial holding was a long way off, and both commanders knew that Cromwell, who had staked his own reputation on the success of the Western Design, would dwell on their failure to take Hispaniola. Although Penn and Venables endured brief stays in the Tower for deserting their posts, they left the men on Jamaica to face a much grimmer fate. With little in the way of provisions, the English army again fell prey to hunger and disease. A soldier on Jamaica gave this horrifying account of how the English wilted in the tropics: “Never did my eyes see such a sickly time, nor so many funerals and graves all the town over that it is a very Golgotha. . . . [S]ome of the soldiery are buried so shallow that the Spanish dogs which lurk about the town scrape them and eat them.” Most of the seven thousand English soldiers who first landed on Jamaica perished there

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within the first two years. Death laid low even the highest among the English in the West Indies, including the expedition’s haughty commissioner, Edward Winslow. But while Winslow, the scourge of Levellers in New and Old England, met the greatest leveler of them all in the West Indies, back in England, Coleman Street’s transatlantic radicals had resurrected the Levelling spirit, rousing radical republican opposition to what they deemed the protector’s “enslaving design” in the West Indies. As we will see in the next chapter, telling the freedom story of those who undertook such political labor will reveal the ideological origins of abolition in the Atlantic world, the greatest legacy of the English Revolution.66 T h e English Revolution led to the creation of a republic that engaged in the most concentrated and expansive phase of empire-building to that point in English history. Coleman Street’s godly elite made indispensable contributions to this process. Having broken decisively with the Levellers, principal figures from this cohort, led by Martin Noell, helped orchestrate the traffic in unfree labor from Britain, Ireland, and Africa that made England’s burgeoning plantation empire possible. Godly eminences from the ward also held seats in Parliament and London’s Common Council and gained appointments to money-making offices overseeing the commonwealth’s collection of the excise, customs duties, and other taxes, positions that allowed them to become key figures in the revolutionary state. Led by Henry Vane, former colonists entered these ranks as well and made important contributions to the Revolution’s imperial turn, shaping the content of the Navigation Act, designing the buildup of the republican navy, and playing decisive parts in the planning and execution of the conquest of Ireland, the first Anglo-Dutch War, and the Western Design, which the state justified as a millennial crusade to liberate humanity from Antichrist’s imperial proxy on earth, Catholic Spain. In truth, revolutionary England’s rapid expansion came at an incredible cost to humankind, one that most of the Revolution’s historians have been reluctant to reckon with in its decisive Atlantic context. The state impressed tens of thousands of soldiers and sailors “against their consciences” and drove tens of thousands of them to their deaths in wars against the Irish, Dutch, and Spanish. These Englishmen, most of them mutinous conscripts, did not sacrifice themselves for England; instead, the men governing the English state sacrificed them in their pursuit of wealth and political dominion. In Ireland, the blood lust, greed, and ambition of the revolutionary elite led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Catholics, who perished from disease, hunger, exposure, and outright violence; those who survived

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suffered cultural humiliation, homelessness, disfranchisement, religious persecution, imprisonment, transplantation, and transportation into colonial bond slavery. The revolutionary regime additionally transported thousands of the English poor and Scots prisoners of war into colonial bond slavery. England’s involvement in the African slave trade also increased through the Navigation Act, although colonial planters and merchants complained that the act politically “enslaved” them. In bleak contrast to the self-congratulatory language of English liberty, thousands and thousands of people from Britain, Ireland, Africa, and the Americas would be worked to death on colonial plantations. Meanwhile, the English indigent and working poor continued to languish as the revolutionary government ignored their plight to concentrate on lucrative imperial expansion. Indeed, the regime’s efforts to mobilize unfree plantation labor represented its most concerted effort in the way of domestic “poor relief”—a draconian solution much at odds with the practical Christian radicalism that guided the Leveller and Barebone Parliaments’ vision of social and economic justice. In the end, this blood tide of death, slavery, and destruction created a “red Atlantic” whose currents flowed wherever the imperial turn took the English Revolution. But another kind of “red Atlantic” also came into being at this time, created by Levellers, Fifth Monarchists, Irish tories, buccaneers of European and African descent, Native Americans, slaves, bond slaves, and mutinous soldiers and sailors serving in England, on the high seas, and around the empire. Although groups within these demographics combined in locales such as the West Indies with some frequency, as a whole they did not see themselves as wrapped up in a common cause. Their enemies, however, did, and described them interchangeably as rebels, savages, seditionists, mutineers, and monsters who threatened property, civility, reformation, and properly constituted authority. Looking through the eyes of contemporaries, we thus see how the English empire was contested at its creation by the people it exploited and oppressed as well as by radicals who had helped bring the revolutionary state into being. A cosmopolitan range of groups from around the Atlantic world organized this opposition in discrete locations, often thousands of miles from the lands of their birth; at different times and in many places, they opposed the English imperialists who had imprisoned, impressed, and enslaved people of multiple creeds and colors. In the next chapter, we will follow this manifold resistance back to Coleman Street Ward, London, where a transatlantic community of radicals converged to organize a republican movement to reverse the bloody, enslaving course on which the imperial turn had taken the English Revolution.

chapter seven R

“The Axe Is Laid to the Root” Freedom against Slavery in the Revolutionary Atlantic

These governments have brought forth nothing but blood monsters. . . . [T]hose in covenant . . . with the Great Jehovah . . . are now making inquisition for blood and the blood-letters . . . to whip the money changers, and merchants, and buyers and sellers that are so busy now in their merchandise of slaves and souls of men.1 —Fifth Monarchist proclamation, Coleman Street Ward, London (1656) t h e w e s t e r n Design made Martin Noell, already a rich man, even richer. It also made him one of the most commanding figures of the Protectorate regime. Noell had opened an office in the Excise House, only steps away from his home in the Old Jewry, which meant that he hardly had to leave his Coleman Street neighborhood to perform most of his public functions. These included, among others, naval prize commissioner, poor relief commissioner, postmaster, excise and customs collector, government financier, London alderman, member of Parliament, and prime mover on the Council of State’s influential Trade Committee. The merchant also made the Excise House the center of operations for Martin Noell and Company, his private contracting firm, which did business with English and Irish textile concerns as well as merchants, farmers, planters, fishermen, and victuallers from Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. As ubiquitous as he was industrious, the well-connected Noell supplied the army and navy with provisions, weapons, uniforms, horses, and hardware. He also shipped horses, shoes, tools, and textiles to planters in the West Indies and the Chesapeake. Like other elite merchant-revolutionaries from the ward, Noell sat as a di239

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rector on the boards of prominent joint-stock ventures, including the Levant, Baltic, and East Indian Companies, the latter founded by his Coleman Street predecessor Sir Maurice Abbot. Following another commercial path pioneered by Abbot, Noell contracted with planters, merchants, the City, and the national government to ship enslaved human beings from Africa, Britain, and Ireland into plantation bondage.2 While Noell prospered, young James Revel, another Coleman Streeter, sank into a state of dissipation. Coming from poverty, Revel apprenticed to a tinsmith, a good man, as he recalled, who tried to teach him an honest living. But like many other poor boys in the ward, the wayward apprentice rejected these meager prospects and chose a life of crime. As part of a gang of teenage thieves, Revel hid in the dark, cramped lanes that made a maze of the ward’s streetscape, waiting there or in the shadows of Moorfields to prey on the unwary or the simply unlucky. After committing their depredations, the gang would repair to nearby taverns, flush with cash and ready to carouse. But the law cut short Revel’s criminal career; the young thieves were arrested, tried at Newgate, and quickly convicted as felons. But rather than leaving jail in a jostling cart for the short trip to the Tyburn Tree, Revel and the other convicts were marched in chains to the Tower of London, taken down to the banks of the Thames, and forced aboard a ship riding at anchor, which spirited them away across the western ocean to the colonies. Arriving in the Chesapeake after being kept below deck with sixty other felons, Revel was “sold,” in his own words, as “a slave” to serve a fourteen-year term. On the tobacco plantation where he was forced to work, the “transports” from England and the “negros” they worked beside “fared alike” except in one crucial category; in the unlikely event that the enslaved from England survived, they would be freed at the end of their terms; Africans, in contrast, would end their days in bondage.3 From iron-barred windows in the Tower of London, another Coleman Streeter, the imprisoned Fifth Monarchist Thomas Venner, might have been able to catch a glimpse of his house near Katherine’s Stairs, a tough urban enclave in the East End of London not far from his place of incarceration. There, hard by the docks, under the towering masts of tall ships riding at anchor, the commonality waged violent freedom struggles that pitted the life of liberty against the death of slavery. Waterfront crowds often led by women battled to rescue men and boys from roving press gangs; mobs, again led often by women, formed frequently in Katherine Stairs to wage street fights with the kidnappers who lured young, mostly poor people onto the vessels that took them to the colonies where they would be sold as bond

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slaves. Venner himself must have witnessed some of these street battles, and likely took part in them; during his two-year stay in the Tower of London, he probably thought about these freedom struggles while reflecting on how far the Protectorate had deviated from the original purpose of the Revolution, to liberate the people from bondage. He certainly would have thought about the welfare of his own family in Katherine’s Lane, only a few hundred yards beyond the prison wall. But Venner had traveled much farther than a few steps across east London to reach his jail cell. Indeed, as this chapter will reveal, Venner’s journey to the Tower had encompassed the Atlantic world itself, beginning in Samuel How’s conventicles, continuing in New England in the Boston militia, and finally ending in Interregnum England, where the cooper had become Coleman Street’s most infamous Fifth Monarchist radical.4 As illustrated in my accounts of Noell, Revel, and Venner, and as I have explained throughout the book, the English Revolution can be understood as an Atlantic event. Focusing on Coleman Street Ward, where influential revolutionaries lived and where momentous events of the Revolution took place, has attuned us to the Atlantic horizons of the revolutionaries’ lives and the range of change they wished to visit upon England and the wider world. This chapter traces the ways in which the ward’s merchant revolutionaries, steering the republic on its westward course of empire, accelerated the rise of slave societies in the colonies well before the terrible transformation to a plantation labor force dominated by enslaved Africans.5 As the chapter discusses, however, the rise of slave societies in the English Atlantic provoked an abolitionist response in the colonies led by Samuel Gorton, who, following his stint in the mid-1640s as a Coleman Street Leveller, fused the struggle against political slavery to the struggle against economic slavery in New England. Back in London, the former Bay Colonist Thomas Venner transformed Coleman Street Ward into an organizational locus for the most militant branch of the Fifth Monarchist movement as it rose to revive “the good old cause” of the English Revolution in the face of its imperial degeneration. These millenarian radicals measured the decay of Christian virtue in the commonwealth through an apocalyptic republican perspective that revealed how the political reenslavement of the English nation under prerogative government had led to the creation of an inequitable empire based on economic slavery. The chapter concludes that transatlantic radicals led by Venner and Gorton linked the realization of republican freedom in England and the colonies, and thus the progress of the apocalyptic project of the Protestant Reformation, to the end of slavery and slave trading in the empire.6

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Mo s t historians have argued that while plantation laborers from Britain and Ireland lived harsh lives in the colonies, they worked as servants rather than slaves. In the mid-seventeenth century, however, the English around the Atlantic world had a much more complex view of colonial plantation work. Instead of drawing distinct lines between servants and slaves, many believed that two different kinds of slaves, “bond slaves” and lifelong slaves, worked side by side on English plantations, with perpetual bondage reserved for Africans and Native Americans. Unfortunately, despite all of the attention lavished on the language of freedom and slavery in the age of the English Revolution, historians have overlooked the significance of the seventeenth-century phrase “bond slavery.” Contemporaries used the term to distinguish between discrete types of chattel slavery, to differentiate term slavery from lifelong bondage. It was no mere metaphor for a lived experience of stolen liberty and forced labor. As discerned by colonists, colonial courts, foreign travelers, English popular opinion, the English press, and slaves and bond slaves themselves, merchants and planters enslaved not only “negros” from Africa and “savages” from the Americas but their Christian coreligionists from Britain and Ireland as well. To help us understand how the English thought about colonial slavery in the seventeenth century, we will turn to two vivid, exceedingly rare accounts left by the revolutionary-era Londoners Charles Bayly and James Revel.7 Although he came from a privileged background, Charles Bayly ran away from home as a teenager. The decision plunged the young man into a desperate state of poverty and defenselessness that left him vulnerable to the pretended kindness of predators. As Bayly later told the story, he met with such a predator, “one Bradstreet,” in the port of Gravesend not far down the Thames from London. Bradstreet, as Bayly wrote, “was commonly called a spirit, for he was one of those who did entice children and people away for Virginia; he fell into discourse with me, and I being in tender years, he did cunningly get me on board a ship, which was then there riding ready for to go to those parts, and I being once on board, could never get on shore, until I came to America.”8 In the terminology of the day, Bradstreet had “spirited” Bayly away to what the unfortunate young man called “Maryland in Virginia.” In the mid- to late seventeenth century, people came up with other terms besides spiriting to describe what had happened to Bayly and thousands of others, turning to the Bible for the ominous-sounding moniker man-stealing. They also invented terms such as Barbadosed and kidnapped, all in order to give language to something new in Britain and Ireland, the capture, chattelization, transatlantic exportation, and sale of

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human beings into bondage in a colonial market. As kidnapping suggests, those who trafficked their fellow creatures into bondage usually preyed on children and adolescents, who could be kept in term bondage for longer periods than could older workers. Spirits and kidnappers usually plied their trade through deception, “inveigling” their victims with promises of light work and easy living in the colonies; in other cases, they tempted their prospects with drink and sex. When these methods failed, sometimes spirits turned to brute force, but only as a last resort since the “kicking and biting” of resistant children attracted the unwanted attention of London crowds. Other victims of spirits languished for weeks in covert holding cells on the London waterfront, warehoused by trafficking middlemen who made their licit livings selling provisions to ships stocking up for transatlantic voyages. When captains called at these places to purchase provisions, they could also purchase bond slaves.9 The Virginia planter William Bullock, who lived in the Chesapeake during the very years when Bayly toiled there, remarked that “men nicknamed spirits” provided the bulk of the plantation workforce. A Virginia minister noted that “Men-stealers, termed otherwise Spirits or Kidnappers’ . . . whole employ . . . is to . . . seduce indigent, ignorant Souls under fair pretences . . . making Golden promises of things never likely to come to pass, drilling many distressed, desperate wretches on to their own speedy and unavoidable destruction.” Bullock thought workers supplied by spirits were bad for business because their bitterness kept them from working hard, and some planters made an effort to acquire workers with “good honest indentures.” The Barbados planter Carl Helyar, for instance, ordered “Mr. Warren,” his labor recruiter in England, to steer clear of spirits and those “base means of kidnapping” while securing a supply of unfree workers. But the fact that Helyar took the time to warn Warren against using kidnappers illustrates that “respectable” merchants commonly turned to spirits to “recruit” unfree labor for the colonies. It should be remembered, however, that while spirits worked illegally, they did not operate in a subterranean black market; indeed, the work of kidnappers fed the main current of unfree labor circulating around the English Atlantic. In Bullock’s words, “spirits” were the “usual way” that planters acquired workers, leaving the line between the so-called legitimate trade in colonial servants and the spirit trade much thinner than most historians have emphasized.10 In the mid-seventeenth century, like tens of thousands of other young people from Britain, Ireland, and Africa, Charles Bayly made his journey across the Atlantic against his will. As the historian Carla Gardina Pestana

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has convincingly demonstrated, voluntary servant migration to the colonies slowed during the disruptions of the Revolutionary era; consequently, coercion and deception, programmatic in the transatlantic African slave trade, began to figure more regularly in the commerce of colonial unfree labor from Britain and Ireland. Parliamentary investigations in the 1640s and 1650s confirmed that spirits dominated “the servant trade” to the colonies. Repeated searches of ships bound for America during this period revealed that the greatest portion of their “servant” cargos had been “spirited” aboard. In the 1650s, the Irish Commissioners discovered a network of spirits working in Irish ports and took ineffective steps to rein in their illicit work. In 1670, a London court heard testimony that over the course of the previous twelve years, one spirit ring alone had supplied the colonies with approximately six thousand workers. A significant amount of the children would have been sold into bondage during the commonwealth period, orchestrated in part by “legitimate” recruiting agencies such as Martin Noell and Company. Once a migrant had been lured or forced aboard a ship, he or she had little choice but to sign a contract or “indenture,” if indeed the captain bothered to offer them one. Parliament and local English courts did little to stop this illegal commerce. They leveled ridiculous punishments against spirits caught in the act; in one instance, a JP burdened a spirit with the astronomical fine of twelve pence. Kidnapping would not become a felony until 1814, although in his own time Charles Bayly could have been hanged or transported for stealing an apple during his hungry days wandering the docks and lanes of Gravesend. Colonial courts, far from returning stolen people to their homes, actually went some way to encourage the spirit trade, effectually legalizing the illegal commerce in servants by imposing contracts on workers who arrived without them.11 Clearly, focusing on servant contracts and the attempts to regulate the servant trade will tell us very little about the nature of this commerce during the Revolutionary era. Concentrating on the buying and selling of servants, however, will explain much; most importantly, such an investigation reveals how prospective servants were actually enslaved. Charles Bayly, like most “indentured servants,” had already been sold before he reached America, in Gravesend more precisely, where Bradstreet the spirit first struck a bargain with the ship captain who took Bayly to Maryland. We can be certain that Bradstreet and the captain did not seek Bayly’s counsel regarding the terms of the agreement, much less his consent. Once in the Chesapeake, the captain “sold” Bayly again to a tobacco planter. While the planter gained control over Bayly’s body without the latter’s approval,

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the captain most likely cashed in on the “head right system,” receiving a large land grant or its equivalent value, usually five hundred pounds of tobacco. The Virginia Company had originally devised the head right as an incentive to merchants, ship captains, and migrants with means to increase the flow of cheap labor into the colonies. The agreement struck between the captain and the planter again made Bayly’s consent irrelevant. Though Bayly in all likelihood received a contract, or certificate of indenture, this hardly secured him from enslavement. Instead, his contract only facilitated his enslavement by sanctioning his kidnapping, his sale in England, his forced transportation, his sale in Maryland, and his new legal condition as his master’s temporary chattel property. Had Bayly even willingly signed a contract free from duress in England, he still would have had no say as to whom he could be sold to in England’s colonies. In America, then, Bayly could be sold and sold again, as many “servants” were, for any reason, according to a contract that he didn’t negotiate and a set of colonial labor laws, called “the custom of the country,” that largely abandoned the statute and common-law liberties that servants enjoyed in England. At the same time, colonial labor laws transposed the draconian provisions regarding vagabonds in English law onto servants in the colonies. As a result, English masters in the West Indies and the Chesapeake were free to sell freeborn human beings like Charles Bayly “up and down the country,” as one critic observed, “like horses.”12 In Bayly’s own words, he was “sold” in Maryland “as a bond slave for seven years.” The fact that Bayly used “bond slave” as a self-reference reveals that he understood indentured servitude as a form of slavery at odds with the English tradition of service. But aside from recognizing Bayly’s usage of “bond slave” as a subjective reflection on his stolen liberty, we can also see how the term cuts to the objective heart of his new status as his master’s alienable property. Although “bond slavery” was certainly not the same thing as the perpetual slavery endured in the colonies by Africans and their progeny, contemporaries used the term to signify a discrete condition of chattelized labor. First, the phrase differentiated the status of servants in England from that of the temporarily enslaved in the Americas. Second, and just as important, bond slavery distinguished the condition of term-bound slaves from that of permanently enslaved Africans and American Indians. Although they noted crucial differences between the kinds of enslavement imposed upon Europeans and Africans (and less often Indians), people in the seventeenth-century English Atlantic still recognized that “Christians,” “negros,” and “savages” labored under multiple forms of slavery. In 1655,

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for instance, the seaman Henry Whistler described the plight of enslaved Africans on Barbados, who were just then beginning to surpass the number of “Christian” or European servants on the island. “The gentry here . . . have most of them 100 or 2 or 3 slaves a piece whom they command as they please . . . with ingones and miserable negors . . . borne to perpetual slavery they and their seed . . . they sell them one to the other as we sell sheep.” Richard Ligon, working around the same time on a book detailing his firsthand experiences on Barbados, wrote, “I have seen such cruelty there done to servants, as I did not think one Christian could have done to another”; “servants” with the worst masters,” he observed, “were not able to endure such slavery.” Alternatively, from the bottom up, black slaves referred to plantation laborers from Britain and Ireland as “white neggers,” a recognition of the enslaved condition plantation workers from Africa shared with others from Europe. And in fact, as if to underscore the common experiences that “Christian servants” shared with the Africans whom they toiled, many unfree workers from Britain and Ireland ended their days as slaves, since thousands perished before their terms expired.13 Contracts obviously did not protect people from Britain and Ireland from being reduced to term-bound chattel slaves; instead, contracts made their enslavement possible. Most scholars, unfortunately, reject this view and insist that when buyers and sellers conducted transactions involving servants, only the time left on the servants’ contracts was being bought and sold and not the servants themselves. Although intended as an objective assessment, such an interpretation is exceedingly partisan, for it reconfigures the historical reality of buying and selling servants into a bloodless legal fiction, thus adopting the planters’ pretense that “the custom of the country” protected servants from enslavement; in fact, as we have seen, the custom of the country, as it evolved in the plantation colonies, actually sanctioned the sale of human beings through a legal language that portrayed such commerce as a traffic in lawful contracts. The distinction between the sale of a contract (or labor) and the sale of a person made sense to merchants, ship captains, and planters, as it elided ancient English statutes against enslaving other Christians. How much sense, however, would this legal fiction have made to a servant after an afternoon on the auction block, after hours of being poked and probed by planters like a piece of livestock? Surely for both black and white unfree workers, one of the worst reminders of their bondage was being sold without their consent. Moreover, servants from Britain and Ireland did not enjoy the legal status of English servants nor, as with the limited mobility that colonial law placed on African and Indian slaves,

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did they have the free run of the colony once their work in the fields ended. Like slaves, servants and not merely their labor were defined objectively as “goods and chattels” in colonial commercial transactions and probate proceedings. Further, colonial ordinances legislated mainly by plantation owners tied indentured workers to their masters’ estates, severely circumscribing their physical movement, leisure time, opportunities for love and marriage, and other rights and privileges, including the liberty to carry arms and to accumulate and dispose of personal property. Additionally, if servants violated any of these ordinances, their terms of service could legally be extended for years, sometimes doubling the time contractually stipulated. In contrast, magistrates punished servants in England through the normative precedents and provisions of common and statute law. Alienating colonial servants from the protections of English law gave colonial masters control over the labor, commercial value, and physical bodies of their workers, who had been stripped of important rights so as to make them a salable species of property. In other words, people, and not just contracts, were being bought and sold in the colonies. Bond slaves like Charles Bayly would have recognized such a statement as a truism.14 We need to recapture Bayly’s contemporary viewpoint. To say that planters sold contracts rather than people is a dehumanizing existential absurdity that privileges a legal fiction, one invented to exploit, over the lived experience of tens of thousands of enslaved people. It also elevates the historical categories of capitalist economics over the inherent dignity of human beings. As the slavery scholar Orlando Patterson has written and as the historians Hilary Beckles, Marcus Rediker, and Peter Linebaugh have reiterated, “[T]he distinction, often made, between selling their labor as opposed to selling their persons makes no sense whatsoever in human terms.” We should privilege these human terms to study “indentured servitude” or bond slavery as an embodied experience rather than as a reflection of disembodied contract law. What happened to Charles Bayly in Maryland happened to him, not to his contract or his “labor.” Indeed, the exploitation that he and other bond slaves endured tells us more about the true character of unfree colonial labor than does his contract, which in any event Bayly and tens of thousands of others did not enter into voluntarily.15 Although “indentured servants” endured real slavery as field workers on colonial plantations, there can be no equivocation concerning the irrefutable truth that enslaved Africans at this time and thereafter fared far worse than those from Europe who were subjected to term bondage. Richard Ligon, a royalist veteran who had been attacked by Levellers for his part in the

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Fenland enclosure projects, came to Barbados in 1647 to serve as a steward on the estate of Thomas Modyford, one of the most prominent planters on the island. After Ligon returned to England in 1650, he wrote a tract about his experiences with plantation life. Although he seemed to sympathize with the plight of “Christian servants” abused by “severe masters,” Ligon justified the perpetual enslavement of Africans in racist terms, calling them a “bloody people . . . as near beasts may be,” suited for bondage and the harsh hand of the overseer. The map of Barbados that Ligon published in his tract depicts Englishmen chasing down and shooting runaway African slaves. On Jamaica, General Sedgewick called for bloodhounds from England to help his troops track down and destroy Africans who had chosen to fight the English rather than submit to their whips on sugar plantations. To terrorize the enslaved into submission, the rotting bodies of resistant black slaves were hanged in cages and from trees and gibbets on the roads and paths and in the marketplaces of the English Caribbean. Others were simply burned at the stake or hacked to pieces. Such was the topography of terror in colonial slave societies. The perverse power such landscapes held over the construction of racial identities in the English Atlantic can hardly be overstated. By the late 1650s, destruction of African life on the sugar plantations of the West Indies had become so banal that the English, anxious over the potential loss of their own civil liberties, worried that their lives could be made, as one MP remarked, as “cheap as a negroes.” Indeed, when a new master purchased James Revel for the last two years of the Coleman Streeter’s term, Revel remembered that his owner promised “he would not use me as a slave, but as a servant if I’d well behave,” the implication being, of course, that English plantation workers were being treated as slaves. Such statements also reinforced the idea that planters should not degrade their “Christian servants” to the same degree as “negros,” an indispensable element in the emerging racialized relationships between masters, servants, and slaves in the colonies.16 Class, ethnic, and racial prejudice infused the top-down view of slaves and bond slaves in the English Atlantic, but how did these unfree workers relate to one another? Some observers reported that “negros” “derided” unfree Irish workers as “white slaves,” while bond slaves of European extraction protested that they should not be treated like “negars” to “slave it” for their masters. Unfree workers from the same groups turned on each other as well, to gain special privileges from masters. On the other hand, common exploitation could create solidarity, strengthening the preexisting bonds between unfree workers from the same regions while forging new ones

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im age 7. The sugar plantation complex involved much more than just cutting cane, as the mechanized production depicted in this scene from the mid-seventeenthcentury French West Indies clearly evinces. In the English West Indies during this period, enslaved people of many colors from around the Atlantic world were forced into the fields and mills to make possible a life of leisure and maximized profits for merchants and planters. People of African descent fared the worst in the Caribbean, however, as the advent of sugar production proved the catalyst behind the terrible transformation to racialized slavery in the English Atlantic. Image taken from Jean Baptiste DuTertre, Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les francois, 4 vols. (Paris, 1667), 2:122. Image courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library (E667 D975h).

between groups differentiated by color, culture, religion, language, and land of origin. Similar to the motley buccaneers of Hispaniola, Irish and African plantation workers on Barbados ran away together, burned fields of sugar cane, and planned armed resistance against those who had enslaved them. Slave owners from antiquity to the present day have struggled to dehumanize the people that they enslave, to break their spirits by dividing the slave population against itself while trying to convince all slaves that they deserve their bondage. The enslaved people from around the Atlantic world, however, often proved resilient in the face of such violent psychological terrorism. Following a near-fatal illness during his years as a bond

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slave, James Revel wrote that “the poor negro slaves . . . bestow’d more pity on him” than his “brutal and inhuman master would.” Having survived the death-dealing capitalist form of “civilization” that the English had brought to America, Revel portrayed enslaved Africans as a source of humanity in the barbaric world of the plantation, a profound insight that he expressed in an epic poem titled The Poor Unhappy Transported Felon. Echoing the French humanist Michel de Montaigne, the Rhode Island seeker Roger Williams, and the London Leveller William Walwyn, the Coleman Street thief James Revel inverted received notions of savagery and civility through the experiential knowledge he had acquired as a Virginia bond slave.17 Insights such as those made by Revel could not be contained to the colonies. The “freeborn” English encountered others born free in Africa who had been brought to England after being enslaved by colonial planters to work as domestic slaves. The London archives reveal that some English servants sympathized with the plight of these stolen Africans. In the spring of 1657, the authorities summoned the servant Thomas Lewes to the Guildhall to respond to charges that he had hidden “one Lawrence, a Blackamoor” from his master, “Matthew Babb, Gentleman,” a Barbados tobacco planter and slave dealer. It appears that Lewes had helped Lawrence to escape to freedom. Salvador, Samuel, John, Juan, Plentherto and Anthony were enslaved Africans leased out as seamen by their owner, the Bermuda planter Anthony Penniston. They had run away after docking in Portsmouth, England, and thereafater were sheltered from slave catchers for months by sympathetic locals, most likely seamen. Across the Irish Sea, persecuted Quakers such as Cashel’s John Grubb shielded Catholics fleeing from Cromwell’s “man-catchers”; in Kilkenny, the Quaker John Perrot pled successfully for the release of hundreds of imprisoned Catholics awaiting colonial transportation. In the meantime, Perrot blasted the conquest, transplantation, and transportation of the Irish with scorching invectives against the protector and his councilors: [N]o custom of your law can cover or hide your inequity; but manifest are your abominations and the perfect shape of your subtle deceits are plainly seen . . . all your cunning pretences cannot change the colour of your detestable practices . . . the Almighty Searcher of all your hearts and dark corners in secret sees and beholds your loathsome abominations . . . the destruction of your neighbors by overthrowing his just cause for your dishonest and unrighteous rewards and gain.

Perrot responded to English imperialism with defiant indignation, but the Irishman’s passion did not arise from blind rage; it stemmed rather from a

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practical Christian critique of empire building rooted in antinomian mysticism. Although many English humanists, statesmen, clergymen, politicians, and merchants believed that the English empire would reach the pinnacle of human civilization, its expansion during the age of the English Revolution struck people of many colors from around the Atlantic world as nasty, brutish, and savage.18 B y the late summer of 1655, the Protectorate regime had alienated most of the English people. Even in the eyes of many revolutionaries, Cromwell and the Council of State appeared as a “junta” of “sword men” who ruled by proroguing Parliament and imprisoning their opponents. When the council “decimated” the English counties in August 1655, rezoning them into ten political districts ruled by major generals, it only confirmed the widespread feeling that the golden reins of English government had slipped from a king to a cadre of grasping officers. Just as the decimation regime began its administration, ships began docking in English ports carrying correspondence and crews of breathless sailors bearing word of the Western Design expedition’s awful fate in the Caribbean. Dispersed from the waterfront and traveling by letter and word of mouth through the public and private spaces of early modern England, the news ate away at the regime’s reputation like a malignancy that only metastasized when it was set in type. But the Council of State first became aware of the popular discontent occasioned by the expedition’s disastrous defeat through district reports filed by the major generals. A brief from Southampton submitted by Major General Edward Whalley gives us a flavor of how transatlantic intelligence informed the growing discord with the Protectorate. Whalley’s communiqué described his encounter with a “Mr. Cole,” whom the townspeople of Southampton had nicknamed “Common Freedom” and whom Whalley himself called “a perfect leveler.” Whalley chose this moniker after Cole, a New Model veteran, waved a copy of the Agreement of the People in his face and condemned the bloodshed of the Western Design as a betrayal of the principles of the Revolution.19 At Whitehall, Cromwell might have borne the word from Hispaniola the hardest: he adjourned to his room and locked himself in his “closet” when he heard the news. When the stout war hero regained his composure and emerged from his chambers, he proclaimed a succession of private fasts and issued calls for days of public humiliation. Formerly unshakable in his providential convictions, the lord protector now felt utterly rebuked by God. In a letter to William Penn’s replacement on Jamaica, Admiral Goodson, Cromwell wrote, “It is not to be denied but the Lord hath greatly humbled

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us in that sad loss sustained at Hispaniola; no doubt we have provoked the Lord, and it is good for us to know, and be abased for the same.”20 At the same time, the Council of State recognized that it needed to rehabilitate its image by defending the expedition to the West Indies. To do so, it chose to manage public opinion by censoring the press; in the two months following the fleet’s return from Jamaica, the government shut down six newspapers. The councilors turned to Marchamont Nedham, the government’s most able propagandist, to reorchestrate the voice of public outrage into a swelling chorus of militant Protestant solidarity.21 Not unlike the officers and MPs who sat with Cromwell on the Council of State, the ruthlessly intelligent Nedham displayed an impressive, even disconcerting, propensity for self-advancement, whether or not the positions he actually took in print squared with his real political convictions, the stuff of which are as inscrutable now as they were in the mid-seventeenth century. The regime employed the talented penman as the editor of Mercurius Politicus, a government organ that Nedham used to portray the capture of Jamaica as a major victory and the Western Design itself as a Protestant crusade against the Spanish Antichrist. It’s also likely that Nedham authored the anonymous tract A Dialogue Containing a Compendious Discourse Concerning the Present Design in the West Indies. The pamphlet, published in September 1655 to counter the blow-back occasioned by the fleet’s return in August, was a piece of outright Protectorate propaganda aimed at justifying the regime’s imperial ambitions. But the author stylized his apologetics through a classical dialogue, a device frequently employed in early modern political discourse and one in which Nedham, steeped in classical and Renaissance literature, would have been well versed. A Dialogue contains a fictitious discussion between a soldier and a sailor, archetypal figures of the nation’s imperial future, conducting an exchange meant to convince the reader that liberty of conscience and its greatest guardian, Oliver Cromwell, had delivered the nation from tyranny. Cromwell appears as the great emancipator of the world’s “persecuted, afflicted, and tormented,” who would empower the commonwealth by refusing, in the face of the black-hearted, slave-driving Spanish, to divest the interest England had already gained in the West Indies. Guided by Cromwell’s godly integrity and bold leadership, the country would perfect the “advancement of the Kingdom of Christ” by delivering the West Indies and beyond from the Iberian “antichrist” and the “Egyptian yoke of bondage” it had imposed upon the innocents of the Americas. Dismissing reports of the massive death toll suffered by the English army in the Caribbean, the soldier in the tract argued that his comrades in Jamaica

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were no sicker than the inhabitants of London. Instead of showing life on the island to be the seething deathtrap that most soldiers really experienced, the author depicted Jamaica as a “canaan,” or promised land. Writing while soldiers were actually starving to death on the island, the author reported that nobody there ever “want[ed]” for “fare”; far from dying of hunger, the infantry fretted about choking on the gold dust they kicked up on leisurely romps through the breezy tropics.22 The deceitful pulp churned out by Nedham and other hirelings laboring in the Protectorate’s propaganda mill did not achieve the desired effect. The millenarian naval administrator Robert Blackborne saw the Western Design’s mercenary motives, and not just its bloody failures, as a sign of England’s fall from providential grace. Blackborne wrapped all of this up in the “boundless ambition” of Cromwell, the Council of State, and its revolutionary merchant supporters. Drawing on what he had learned as a state official, the navy bureaucrat wrote that “war springs from want” or greed. “Like an armed man” holding the people hostage, the imperial state militant “will keep a people . . . poor by oppression.” At what price empire? Blackborne asked, and then tallied the cost: “the price of widows’ prayers and orphans tears.” Condemning the Protectorate for its waste of life in the West Indies, Blackborne wrote that this kind of “gain” did not speak well of the “godliness” of England’s rulers. “Oh, these are sad fruits of our fourteen years fighting! . . . We are,” he despaired, “apt with others wounds to salve our own.” Blackborne then condemned the Western Design as “an enslaving design” that had captivated the body politic in the bonds of corruption and tyranny. To underscore this message, he invoked the figures of both Christ and Cato, the personifications of godly integrity and classical republican purity, measured against imperial license and tyranny. Blackborne wished that “all our courtiers . . . were . . . either Christians or Catos, that would rather conquer for their country then for themselves; but ho, what . . . [Christ] . . . died to preserve they live to spoil, and prey upon the blood of a whole war .” For Blackborne, greed, grief, poverty, and loss of life and liberty had become the toxic “fruits of Reformation” under the Protectorate. Such destruction offered proof that the “the Arm of the Lord hath of late been . . . made bare against” the government through its “fruitless expedition to Hispaniola.”23 In an unpublished manuscript, “The New Design Discovered,”24 an anonymous soldier exposed the West Indian expedition at the time of its departure as a case study of the Protectorate’s apostasy from republican principles. Echoing the army engagements of 1647, he declared that “a

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mercenary army in the commonwealth takes possession of the country’s riches and trade while the people maintain it. . . . [A] mercenary army in any nation doth . . . dispose people to slavery, by degrees they render them ignorant.” The author, a New Model officer, observed that since people owe their lives to “the mercy of God,” a mercenary soldier cheapened his own Christian liberty by selling his life for “a little money, and . . . not only his own blood, but the blood of many innocent souls at the same price. . . . [T]o be a mercenary soldier is a denial of God’s supreme right over all men’s lives.” In this view, not only did mercenary armies impoverish and politically enslave a nation, but their wanton violence led to antichristian sedition by usurping God’s sovereign dominion over the lives of his human creation. By gaining “dominion over bodies,” mercenary armies violated nature’s law as well as God’s. The soldier warned his comrades beyond the seas that to be “hired to destroy men for pay is repugnant to sanity and . . . to that parity in life members and liberty which is to every man by nature, and could not without injustice have been endured by anybody.” If liberties were true liberties, the soldier implied, if they had any consistency, any resilience, their application could not end with justice at the border of a nation. True freedom could not be claimed as the exclusive property of any particular nation, nor could one people presume to govern another without their consent, let alone conquer their country under the guise of a mission of liberation.25 Other radical officers in the New Model declared that their comrades on the Council of State had degenerated into corruption by “hugging the covetous” slave-trading merchant--revolutionaries “to their bosom”; in this way they had struck a new “covenant with the workers of iniquity and so consequently with death and hell.” As England’s new masters, the revolutionary ruling class had violated Jesus’s royal law, making slaves of nations and innocents when all saints were to be, as the apostle Paul wrote, slaves to Christ. Although the army had declared in Scotland in 1650 that it would have only Christ as its king, the revolutionaries in power had crowned themselves while wielding the scepter of arbitrary government. “Have you so soon forgotten,” an officer asked his erring colleagues, “your strong resolutions . . . that you would have no king but Jesus?” The regime’s enslaving power, the felt subjection to political tyranny, reigned over bodies as well as consciences through political imprisonment, press gangs, and colonial transportation. “It will be a dangerous thing not to remember the affliction of Joseph,” warned one of the army plotters, citing the example of the Old Testament figure sold into slavery by his brothers. “The lord com-

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manded that prayer and supplication should be made for all men, and that you should remember those that are in bonds as being bound with them.” “The Lord will not be mocked,” continued the officer, for those “that leadeth into captivity . . . shall go into captivity.” Freedom could not be obtained through the enslavement of bodies, let alone of entire bodies politic.26 The officers were joined in their dissent by two of the most brilliant political writers in English history, James Harrington and John Milton. Harrington called the Protectorate a “perfidious yoke” “supported with blood,” and argued that England required massive constitutional reform if it was to survive as a free state. In the fall of 1656, Harrington issued his justly celebrated and much studied treatise on republican government, Oceana, with the bookseller Livewell Chapman. Chapman had become a fixture in the Coleman Street underground, one who regularly attended Fifth Monarchist meetings conducted by Thomas Venner, a fact that illustrates how the worlds of the radical conventicle and the canonical figures of the republican pantheon converged more closely than scholars have often allowed. Although employed by the Protectorate, John Milton later demonized Cromwell in his epic poem Paradise Lost, which can be read in part as an artful meditation on imperial ambition. Casting Cromwell as Satan, the angel whom God banished from heaven for his arrogance and pride, Milton had the devil say: Honour and empire with revenge enlarged By conquering this new world, compels me now To do what else though damned I should abhor. So spake the fiend, and with necessity, The tyrants plea, excused his devilish deeds.

The honor of conquering for God had collapsed under the weight of corruption and ambition, fatally compromising Cromwell’s capacity to discern good from evil. The combination of hubris and the pursuit of ostensibly noble ends, that is, a Reformation war of avenging “necessity” against the Spanish Antichrist in his American dominions, had transformed the Lion of Judah into a roaring tyrant. The once righteous soldier had succumbed to the perversity of self-righteousness, which, fed by an unholy zeal, had left only blood and destruction in its wake.27 As Milton seems to have indicated elsewhere in Paradise Lost, the tyranny and corruption of the Protectorate had brought down God’s curse upon England, which the nation experienced as the collective loss of its outward or civil liberty and the inward liberty or spiritual integrity of the people.

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Drawing on scripture, critics of the Protectorate identified this curse as the infamous “sin of Achan,” which had been drawn on to condemn earlier military adventures at the Île de Ré in 1627 and in Ireland in 1649. Achan, a soldier in Joshua’s Israelite army, had fought in the battle of Jericho, and despite God’s prohibitions against pillaging, the warrior’s lust for gold had led him on a course of thievery. Achan’s greed caused God to withdraw providential favor from Israel, which then suffered a humiliating defeat by the forces of Ai. After the battle, Joshua, unaware of Achan’s sin, searched for the “accursed thing” that had led God to smite his own people. While his critics typed Cromwell and his councilors as Achans, they too struggled among themselves to correctly identify the “the accursed thing,” the grievous sin that had occasioned God’s controversy with England. The mystery, as all concerned understood, centered on how the honest party could recover its virtue, revive the Good Old Cause of the Revolution, and ultimately restore England’s favor in the eyes of God.28 In the days of the republic, at the height of Vane’s influence, Milton wrote a glowing sonnet in tribute to his friend, portraying Vane as a wise Roman senator. Indeed, the antinomian wisdom animating Vane’s “Roman spirit” allowed him to grasp the mystical relationship between inward and outward liberty at a profundity matched, perhaps, only by his poetic admirer. Such wisdom pervaded Vane’s book A Healing Question, which he published alongside Harrington’s Oceana to provide the Second Protectorate Parliament with a ready way to restore the Republic. But Vane’s more “immediate aim” in A Healing Question, as the historian David Armitage has written, “was the exposing of Achan, and the healing of the wound made so manifest in the collapsing of the western design.”29 Vane wrote that providence and natural right had made the revolutionaries “absolute and complete conquerors over their common enemy;” royal tyranny, the just cause of which they demonstrated by founding a new commonwealth grounded in the concept of popular sovereignty. But for Vane, the humiliation of the Western Design, which he called “a great interruption” in the revolutionaries’ string of military successes, owed to “something rising up” among the saints that seemed “rather accommodated to the private and selfish interest” and not “truly adequate to the common good.” The military, having acquired an “irresistible, absolute, and boundless power” over the affairs of the commonwealth, had embarked upon the mercenary expedition to the West Indies. In this venture, military men and their merchant handlers pursued “self-interest” for “private gain” “instead of favoring and promoting the people’s common good and welfare.” “To do this” while

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spilling blood, Vane warned, was “to take of the accursed thing, which all Israel was said to do in the sin of Achan . . . to have stolen and dissembled” to place the spoils of war “among their own stuff.”30 Unfortunately Vane’s zeal for the old days, allegedly before self-interest crept into the camp of the Lord’s people, belied the greed that drove the conquest of Ireland that he had managed so ably through various committees in the House of Commons. But in the wake of the Western Design, “self-interest,” the very bane of commonwealth principles, had for Vane now replaced the king’s party, Catholic Ireland, and Catholic Spain as the “common enemy.” In A Healing Question, Vane calculated his use of this phrase for effect. Using a term once reserved for the Cavaliers and Irish Catholics, Cromwell had claimed that the Western Design would defeat the “common enemy” that was Catholic Spain. The protector continued to define Spain as such amid the popular fallout surrounding the expedition’s defeat. But Vane, like Milton, believed the self-confident zeal that had led the protector and his councilors to take on Antichrist in America diminished their capacity for self-introspection and thus deadened their sensitivity to the carnal self-seeking that corrupted the Western Design’s higher purposes. The godly had lost sight of the first task of reformation, subduing the inward bondage of avarice through the self-governance of reason and virtue, the latter being defined through the realization of practical Christian love. There was, as Vane advised, no “need to look any farther for the accursed thing.”31 Cromwell, however, had no intention of abasing himself before his critics; instead he threw Vane into prison after the publication of A Healing Question. Answering a charge by the Fifth Monarchist John Rogers, Vane’s fellow prisoner at Carisbrooke Castle, that he governed through force rather than by law, the protector said that “brotherly love” had fled England. The English, he claimed, “would cut the throats of one another should I not keep the peace.” Defending the iron hand, the soldier in the pro–Western Design Dialogue summed up Cromwell’s position: “There is a spirit of division that has crept in among us; the sword must keep the peace or we shall destroy one another.”32 C rom w e l l ’s decision to imprison critics like Vane and Rogers reflected his determination, clear as early as December 1655, to double down on his original gamble for West Indian empire. In his opening speech to the Second Protectorate Parliament in the fall of 1656, Cromwell declared that “all our expense of blood and treasure” in the Caribbean would be made good “by endeavoring that the same might reap some fruits thereof.” In other words,

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to make good on its initial investment of men and money in the Spanish Caribbean, the regime would commit even more of England’s wealth and people, with or without the latter’s consent, to defeating the Spanish Antichrist. Martin Noell and his partner Captain Thomas Alderne predictably benefited from this decision, with the Council of State approving their request to set up a committee to manage the government’s affairs in the West Indies. Noell received a twenty-thousand-acre land grant in Jamaica for his services to the regime. More contracts to ship the British and Irish poor into bond slavery were also forthcoming, and Noell and Alderne planned for the conscription of six thousand more soldiers to send to the West Indies.33 As the historian Christopher Tomlins has written, “[I]mmense resources were mobilized in the service of English ambition, [and] . . . none was more important than people.” The Protectorate’s reliance upon impressment and colonial transportation in the service of empire building clearly bears out Tomlins’s instructive observation. In the military districts governed by the major generals, crews of “watchmen or spies” sped the completion of the country’s “moral reformation,” selecting for colonial transportation thousands of desperate people whose only crime lay in their poverty. In the fall of 1655, the generals’ agents on the ground received instructions “to give over or apprehend such as were of dissolute lives and conversations . . . who were more fit to be sent beyond the seas then to remain here.” One raid conducted on the streets of London sent over a thousand new plantation workers to Barbados. The Venetian ambassador wrote in December 1655 that “there has been some talk in the Council, though nothing has been done yet, that those who have less than £100 sterling a year shall be compelled to go and live in the Virginia islands, the object being to purge the kingdom of noxious humours.” A month later, in January 1656, the ambassador wrote that “persons without employment,” especially in London, were being “subjected to strict perquisition and are compelled to take up some trade or else they are subject to expulsion and chastisement.” Additional proclamations across the length and breadth of the country commanded provincial courts of assize to send lists of felons to Whitehall. James Revel, likely transported in the late 1650s, might have been shipped out of England in the aftermath of the Western Design, when the state resolved to make fuller use of felon transportation.34 “J.F.,” a New Model veteran, wrote in dismay about how the regime had turned the poor in the army against the poor of the city. Speaking directly to the soldiers, the veteran warned, “[Y]ou are night by night upon the guard; you are night and day constrained like so many catchpoles silently to steal through the streets, whereby to surprise

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an innocent person, and bring him to destruction; and yet all this while you are poor and beggarly; you labor for nought and if you had your wages twere no more than would keep you from starving.” J.F. might have been describing the press for soldiers, or the army dragnets that caught up the poor to supply merchant ships with bond slaves to sell to colonial planters; both forms of bodily expropriation drove thousands of “innocent person[s] to destruction.” Under the Protectorate, New Model Army soldiers had, in effect, become state-deployed spirits. The state itself had become a predator that stole lives as well as bodies; many spirited into unfree military and plantation labor were subjected to such dangers and brutalities that they were soon, in the words of Charles Bayly, “laid in the dust.” On the Jamaican “Golgotha,” mostly impressed soldiers continued to perish in horrifying proportions throughout the late 1650s. Unsurprisingly, few found military service in the West Indian or Irish garrisons attractive, so spirits continued to supply troops for the army; sometimes soldiers who had been impressed or spirited to Ireland and the West Indies were resold as bond slaves and shipped to other colonies. Confirming previous allegations by the Virginia merchant Robert Tilghman, the Council of State received a report in July 1656 that three ships had left Jamaica for Virginia laden with soldiers who were then “sold” to planters “without their consent.” The same people were being sold again and again throughout the empire for unfree labor in the military and on plantations. Conscripts from England spirited away to Ireland to serve in the conquest also died in droves. The “great part” of the “press men” were, as the Irish commissioners wrote in 1652, “lame, blind, children, aged, and fitter for the hospital than an army, and all of them without clothes.” A year later, the commissioner stood astonished at the “vast numbers of men [who] have perished in Ireland, by the hardship of the service, cold (through want of clothes), and diseases of the country.”35 Cromwell’s decision to reinvest in the colonization of the West Indies had a lethal effect on Catholic Ireland as well. In 1655, the Act for the Attainder of the Rebels in Ireland effectively made all Catholics eligible for colonial transportation. The resultant increase in this transatlantic traffic in unfree labor ultimately meant that between 1649 and 1660 the revolutionary state shipped somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty thousand Irish Catholics to the colonies, which exceeded the number of Africans enslaved in Barbados and perhaps the entire English Atlantic during the same period. Following the defeat of Ormonde’s forces, Ireland continued to serve as a laboratory for English empire building. In 1652 an Oxford professor of anatomy,

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William Petty, who had served earlier as an assistant to Thomas Hobbes, had been appointed by the commonwealth to assess the future profitability of Irish land and labor. Called the Down Survey, Petty’s project contributed decisively to the scientific and empirical basis of what he called both “political anatomy” and “political arithmetic,” a field of knowledge that studied the intersections between economic growth, the increase of state power, and the security of the social order. Petty’s eighteenth-century successors would rename the field “political economy.” Shortly before Petty ventured into Ireland, an artist portrayed him in a portrait with a grim visage, dressed in black and holding a human skull, a fitting image for a scholar deadened to the human cost that his cold calculus of power required. Drawing from his findings in the Down Survey, common knowledge of petty thievery among the English poor, and intelligence from the colonies regarding the value of enslaved African labor, the professor explained how the Irish conquest and the state’s bodily expropriation of the English poor could secure unfree labor for the tobacco and sugar plantations of the Chesapeake and West Indies at a value equal to what the market bore in the traffic of enslaved Africans. Instead of hanging thieves and wasting bullets shooting Irish tories, Petty recommended enslaving them: You value the people who have been destroyed in Ireland as slaves and negroes are usually rated, viz,. at about 15 one with another; men being sold for 25, children for 5. . . . Why should not insolvent thieves be punished with slavery rather than death. So as being slaves they may be forced to as much labour, and as cheap fare, as nature will endure, and thereby become as two men added to the commonwealth, and not as one taken away from it.

Refashioning human beings as capitalist commodities and placing them on scales calibrated according to the logic of political arithmetic, Petty weighed the future profitability of plantation capitalism and did not find it wanting. The Oxford scholar turned imperial architect correctly and tragically deduced that the expropriated labor power of Africans, the English poor, and Irish Catholics constituted a capital foundation for the strength, stability, and prosperity of the propertied English body politic.36 Despite William Petty’s Cromwellian ties, in 1661 Charles II would knight him for his services to the empire. The English Revolution’s imperial turn moved out of Ireland and across the Atlantic in a widening gyre, abetting the growth of bond slavery in the Chesapeake, the Caribbean, and New England as well, although on a much smaller scale. Even though statute 91 of the Massachusetts Body of Liber-

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ties explicitly forbade “bond slavery,” Massachusetts colonists did purchase Irish and Scots that Parliament, the New Model Army, and the Council of State regimes dispatched “beyond the seas” in the late 1640s and 1650s. John Cotton wrote Cromwell in 1651 that the godly had not enslaved the Scots even though they had been taken captive in a just war, perhaps to disassociate Massachusetts from the rumors that Christian Britons were being enslaved in the colonies. The treatment the Scots received while working in the ironworks that John Winthrop Jr. had founded at Saugus compares favorably with the conditions endured by plantation bond slaves in Virginia, Maryland, and the Caribbean. Scots prisoners were even allowed to marry into the local population during their terms of service, a liberty that colonial labor codes placed beyond the grasp of most plantation workers in the West Indies and Chesapeake. Beyond the ironworks in which the Scots labored, however, Irish Catholics fared much worse in New England.37 In early 1654, the merchant David Selleck, who had lived in both the Bay Colony and Virginia, received a license from the Irish Commissioners and the Council of State to round up four hundred Irish children to transport to Virginia and New England. Six years later, two of the young people transported by Selleck, William Downing and Phillip Welch, filed a petition in the Massachusetts General Court against their master, Samuel Symonds. In 1654 at the age of fourteen, they testified, they had been “brought out of” Galway “contrary to our own wills and minds.” They did not believe that they had lost their liberty. Instead, “[w]ith divers others” they had been “stolen in Ireland by some of ye English soldiers, in ye night out of their beds and brought to Mr. Dill’s ship, where the boat lay ready to receive them . . . where there were divers others of their countrymen, weeping and crying, because they were stolen from their friends.” Arriving in New England, Captain Dill sold two of the Irish boys to Symonds, striking a nine-year deal for “£26 in merchantable corn or live cattle,” a contract that “was never acted by our consent or knowledge,” as Welch and Downing testified. Symonds quickly negotiated another clause in the contract, securing Welch for an additional two years of service. But by 1661, the boys from County Galway had had enough; they refused to work anymore and demanded their back pay, as they, in their own words, had already labored “three years more than ye use to sell them for at Barbados, when they are stolen in England.” Welch and Downing’s testimony here displays their own education in the inner workings of the Atlantic economy, particularly in how the theft of bodies, whether in England or in Ireland, figured centrally in the mobilization of unfree colonial labor, and how those “stolen” might draw on

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the custom of one “country,” Barbados, to liberate themselves in another, the Bay Colony. In this way, Welch and Downing, who knew that they had been enslaved, construed themselves as free cosmopolitans who could appeal to the customs of the country from around the Atlantic to obtain their bodily liberty. The Massachusetts magistrates, however, were not impressed by the colonial working-class education underlying the Irishmen’s petition for freedom, nor the ethos of common equity that informed it. Although the court officially recognized that the young Hibernians had been stolen away and compelled to labor against their will, the magistrates nonetheless affirmed the validity of Welch’s and Downing’s contracts.38 D e s p i t e the progress of slave trading and bond slavery in New England, puritans had defined their concept of economic justice against these practices at the outset of the Revolutionary era. In statute 94.10, the Body of Liberties (1641) incorporated the Mosaic prescription against “man-stealing,” making capturing and selling a person into slavery a capital offense. Perhaps equally striking, the Downing and Welch decision of 1661 contradicted a 1645 precedent against man-stealing set by the former Coleman Street resident and Bay Colony republican Richard Saltonstall, in a case that involved the same David Selleck who had sold Welch, Downing, and hundreds of other Irish into colonial bondage.39 In 1645, Selleck contracted with James Smith, captain of the Rainbow and a member of Boston’s First Church, for a slaving voyage to Guinea. While on the African coast, Smith’s first mate, Thomas Keyser, also of Boston, contrived with the other ships’ officers to foment a battle between neighboring Guinean towns for the purposes of acquiring captives to enslave. Beyond prompting a very unjust war, Keyser murdered a number of Africans and helped set fire to one of the towns caught in the middle of the slaving conspiracy. After Captain Smith and First Mate Keyser traded some of their African captives in Madeira in exchange for a cargo of wine, they fell out over the sale of the spirits in Barbados. Keyser ended up piloting Smith’s ship back to Boston, where he sold two of the Guinea captives. When Smith brought the case to the attention of the authorities, Saltonstall, as an assistant, petitioned the court for the release and return of the two men to Guinea. In the petition, Saltonstall wrote that the primary purpose of the elected magistrate was to work for “the advancement of the gospel and the good of the people of this plantation . . . dispensing justice equally and impartially according to the laws of God and this land.” In this light, judging without respect to persons, Saltonstall saw himself bound “in the case concerning the negers taken by Capt Smith and

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Mr Keser” to proclaim that “stealing negers” was a “crying sin” and a violation of “the law of God and the law of this country.” Conveying Africans into bondage “whether by force or fraud,” as Saltonstall wrote, could not be tolerated in a colony ostensibly dedicated to redeeming humanity from the bondage of sin.40 Amazingly, given his rocky relationship with his peers on the bench and their propensity to rule as a law unto themselves, the General Court approved Saltonstall’s petition, ordering “such timely redress for what is past and such a law for the future as may sufficiently deter all others belonging to us . . . [from the] . . . . heinous and crying sin of man-stealing.” The court then ordered that those “unlawfully taken be by the first opportunity sent to [their] native country of Guinea” along with letters expressing the court’s dismay at Keyser and Smith’s actions. Ironically, two years before ordering the return of the stolen Africans, the court had sentenced Gortonists to hard labor in chains after they had been taken captive in the raid by the Massachusetts militia that had concluded with the burning of their settlement at Shawomet. But popular outcry had led to the emancipation of the Gortonists, something Saltonstall most likely pushed for from his seat at the bench. At the same time, Saltonstall, having warned the colonists that their political enslavement by the Standing Council could lead to their physical enslavement by the French, conducted a magisterial antislavery campaign on the court that led to the liberation of the captive men from Guinea and their return to Africa. Unfortunately, despite Saltonstall’s petition, New Englanders would begin trading African slaves at home and in the West Indies, the Chesapeake, and the Carolina Low Country as the seventeenth century wore on. But the fact that Saltonstall did not stop the spread of the slave trade in New England should not cause us to lose sight of the significance of his achievement. The former resident of Coleman Street Ward launched the first judicial protest against the African slave trade in the history of the English Atlantic world. The case made Saltonstall New England’s leading opponent of both political and economic slavery in the 1640s. In 1649 he would return to London, where two years later his brother-inlaw the Rhode Island antinomian John Clarke would join him on Coleman Street.41 Hostility to economic slavery had developed in Rhode Island, as it had in England and Massachusetts, within the context of a struggle against political slavery. In May 1647, Shawomet (renamed Warwick in honor of the town’s noble patron) united with the neighboring towns of Providence, Portsmouth, and Newport to form a single government under a new constitution,

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the Acts and Orders of Rhode Island. Importantly, the whole body of freemen had a hand in drafting, deliberating, and ratifying the Acts and Orders, which rejected the ancient constitutional mix of monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic forms of government, stating explicitly “that the form of government established is democratical; that is to say, a government held by ye free and voluntary consent of all, or the greater part of the free inhabitants.” Having been compelled to form a colony of disparate exiles burned by their experiences with prerogative courts in Old and New England, the colonists first stipulated that nobody could be imprisoned, exiled, deprived of their goods, or stripped of their bodily and civil liberties unless by some “lawful judgment of his peers, or by some known law, and according to the letter of it, ratified and confirmed by the major part of the General Assembly lawfully met and orderly managed.” Second, with the personal reign of Charles I hovering in the recent past and facing the ambitions of the powerhungry William Coddington in the present, the Rhode Islanders limited governors to one-year terms and stipulated that no person could “presume to bear or execute any office . . . not lawfully called to.” Third, to protect the constitutional integrity of the body politic, the framers forbade the assembly to enact any laws “but such as are founded upon the charter.” Finally, as they explained, far from having “popularity” “prove . . . an anarchy and so a common tyranny,” the Rhode Islanders believed that “democratical” government prevented anarchy by making elected officials accountable to the people and the rule of law, thus serving as a barrier to the lawlessness of arbitrary government. Ratifying the Acts and Orders in the same year that the Levellers proposed the first Agreement of the People, the Rhode Islanders framed a constitution to preserve themselves from the magisterial prerogative and its corollary, political enslavement.42 Undeterred, Coddington continued his quest to put Rhode Island’s government under his personal jurisdiction, convincing Parliament to grant him a proprietary charter as the colony’s lifelong governor. Coddington’s charter created such a stir that the freemen of Providence and Newport respectively dispatched Roger Williams and John Clarke to Old England to prevent Coddington from turning Rhode Island into his personal fiefdom.43 In 1651, while Clarke sailed with Williams on a mission to defend their reformation experiment in republican government from political slavery, Rhode Islanders at home worked to prevent economic slavery from corrupting the same. Although New England itself did not produce any slavesociety colonies, the knowledge of slavery’s spread around the English Atlantic had become so pervasive that in the mid-1640s John Winthrop’s

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correspondent Emmanuel Downing, a Bay Colonist, assumed the governor knew how profitable perpetual bondage had proved in the West Indies. “I suppose you know very well,” Downing wrote, that “we shall maintain twenty Moors cheaper than one English servant.” Intercolonial correspondence and commerce as well as direct contact with Barbadians migrating to New England would have made colonists there very aware of slavery’s rise around the English Atlantic. In 1649, recognizing how lucrative slave trading could be, the Rhode Islander William Withington purchased a half share of a ship, presciently christened The Beginning, and after having it outfitted at Portsmouth, sent the vessel and its crew on a voyage around the Atlantic, trading for slaves in “Guinney” and selling them in Barbados in return, most probably, for their value in sugar. Beyond the enslavement of Africans, New Englanders became immediately familiar with bond slavery in the wake of the imperial conquests of Ireland (1649) and Scotland (1651), when the revolutionary regime began shipping some of its prisoners to work against their will in Massachusetts. Being forced into such a state of unfreedom could evoke strong feelings in the colonies, as the words of the Rhode Islander Samuel Crooke attest. When Crook went into debt, he warned “whosoever” that forcing him into labor to pay off his arrears would surely end in “the death of him or . . . the death of me.”44 Against the rising tide of slavery and slave trading, the Rhode Island Assembly took action in May 1652 under the direction of its “moderator,” Samuel Gorton. Having witnessed with revulsion “the common course practiced amongst Englishmen to buy Negers, to that end that they may have them for service or slaves forever,” the Rhode Island assembly resolved to act for “the preventing of such practices among us.” But moving beyond the permanent enslavement of Africans, the statute also sought to prevent the type of bond slavery that the Irish had already begun to suffer from in Massachusetts. Consequently, through Gorton’s leadership, the law placed both bond and permanent slavery on a continuum of anti-Christian inequity, ordering “that no black mankind or white being forced by covenant bond or otherwise” would “serve any man or his assigns for longer than ten years.” “Black mankind or white” bound to labor in Rhode Island would serve “as the manner is with English servants.” Moreover, to force Rhode Island slaveholders to free their slaves rather than profit by selling them out of the colony, the assembly imposed a £40 fine per sale of a slave, an amount that well exceeded the going price (£15–25) for slaves.45 Antinomians had founded Rhode Island to serve God, to make their colony an instrument of reformation, which, according to the Rhode Is-

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land founder and future Fifth Monarchist John Clarke, meant liberating the “inward” and “outward man” from all forms of antichristian bondage and arbitrary mastery, whether religious, political, economic, or cultural. The Rhode Islanders had chosen a republican form of government to reach this religious end, further refining this solution by constitutionally democratizing their religiously tolerant commonwealth. Moving beyond the fundamental and mutually sustaining innovations of democracy and full liberty of conscience, the colonists next turned their backs on the worst form of prerogative mastery in the English Atlantic, chattel slavery. Rejecting the slave and servant laws of the Chesapeake and Caribbean colonies, Rhode Islanders looked toward the restoration of traditional English labor laws to eliminate economic bondage in their own commonwealth, under a radical form of republican government that they had developed in America, but one that nonetheless was guided by the egalitarian spirit that had inspired Gorton during his days among the Levellers in London. During the age of the English Revolution, in the midst of efforts that spanned the Atlantic to advance reformation through republican forms of government, Rhode Island’s abolition ordinance wedded opposition to economic slavery with the wider struggle against political slavery precisely when the former began expanding exponentially around the early empire. Since republics from the classical through early modern ages had relied on economic slavery as a material foundation for political liberty, the 1652 Rhode Island ordinance anticipated the Emancipation Proclamation by over two centuries, when the US government formally recognized that the liberty of some could not coexist with the enslavement of others in a just republic. In terms of arbitrary cultural mastery, the abolition ordinance directly undermined the colonial racial hierarchy, which justified the permanent enslavement of “savages” from Africa and the Americas. By preventing the enslavement of “white mankind,” the ordinance also rejected the imperial hierarchies of class and colonization that had legitimized the bond slavery of the poor and seditious from Britain and Ireland. Historians have dismissed the importance of the 1652 abolition ordinance, citing the fact that slavery and slave trading became widespread in Rhode Island in the eighteenth century. But why should scholars dismiss the first attempt to abolish slavery in the mid-seventeenth century due to what transpired in the eighteenth century? The radicals on Narragansett Bay should be credited for crossing a threshold in the history of human freedom. Linking the abolition of slavery to the revolutionary principles of Rhode Island’s republican-styled, religiously tolerant commonwealth, the ordinance signi-

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fied a belief that soul liberty remains meaningless without bodily liberty. Moreover, contra the canon of Western political philosophy, the law arose from a conviction that the political freedom of some could not coexist with the economic enslavement of others, including non-Christians. In not unrelated religious terms, Gorton and his cohort, as practical Christians, believed that the personal sin of selfishness led to the social sin of self-seeking, where a corrupted soul objectified others as means to self-interested ends. Such sin violated the royal law of Christ, which commanded human creation to see persons as ends in and of themselves, reflections of God’s glory made in his own image. Economic slavery represented the most extreme form of tyranny, where one human being, seeking his own gain, could impose his will on another at the complete, dehumanizing expense of the latter. In this way slave masters became enslaved to their own moral corruption and degenerated into tyrants who usurped the inherent divine liberty of “fellow creatures” made in the image of God. Such an institution, in the view of Rhode Island’s republican assembly, destroyed the well-being of the enslaved and eviscerated the virtue of a citizenry ostensibly engaged in a revolutionary brand of politics to advance the kingdom of Christ on earth. An achievement of transcendental proportions in both ethical and intellectual terms, the abolition law stands in stark contrast to England’s emergent political economy of empire, which through the vehicle of the Western Design had graduated from theory to practice. Rather than a universal ideal of human freedom founded on the power of selfless love, England’s imperial project in the Caribbean, in striving to secure the country’s liberty and prosperity, rested on a foundation of human bondage and a future of perpetual war. Colonial radicals, however, desired a different future. Taken together with its tolerant democratic constitution and its peaceable relations with the Narragansett Indians, Rhode Island’s 1652 abolition law offers us a glimpse of how different the history of the Atlantic world would have looked had radical practical Christian republicanism triumphed in the age of the English Revolution. A s the problem of economic slavery came to occupy the attention of Rhode Islanders, John Clarke arrived in London on a mission to keep their colony from being politically enslaved to the autocratic will of William Coddington. Clarke soon became a well-known figure in Coleman Street Ward, where he would have been a regular guest in the Swann Alley townhouse of his father-in-law, Richard Saltonstall Sr., one of the founders of Massachusetts. From the Saltonstall townhouse, Clarke would have made the short walk down Swann Alley, where he often joined Thomas Venner and

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Wentworth Day in the upper room of a now nameless tavern where they led Fifth Monarchist meetings in the tradition of Samuel How and the Leveller chiefs. Indeed, the Fifth Monarchists drew their membership from the same demographic of New Model veterans and gathered church members that made up the mainstay of the Leveller base, fed as it was by the antinomian underground. While the Fifth Monarchists attracted the onetime Council of State member General Thomas Harrison, university educated divines such as John Rogers, professionals like the physician John Clarke, and established artisans and City freemen like Thomas Venner, most of the group, as the historian Bernard Capp’s meticulous research has proven, came from the ranks of the commonality, the small producers and unskilled laborers of the early modern working classes. Among their critics they were known as “the very raff of Billingsgate,” a waterfront market just west of the Tower of London reputed for the coarse and profane character of its workforce and residents. But within their own circles, Fifth Monarchists took one of their original inspirations, Samuel How, at face value when he wrote that God had “chosen the poor” to liberate “the rich and carnal” from the bonds of their “filth, dross, and dung” and to lead the saints forward to true glory. Perhaps a Fifth Monarchist subsidized the new edition of the Cobbler’s famous sermon that appeared in 1655, to remind the Protectorate that the poor themselves were instruments of reformation rather than scum to be scoured from the land in the name of godly reform.46 As a Fifth Monarchist petition proclaimed, the saints, reading their own times into signs of apocalyptic portent drawn from scripture, had resolved to “overturn, overturn, overturn all those antichristian designs that are against the setting up of the Kingdom of the Lord Jesus.” The former Bay Colonist and New Model officer Wentworth Day spoke out against the Protectorate in a mass meeting at All Hallows Church in a speech that made him a cause célèbre in the Fifth Monarchist movement. On December 4, 1655, Day read an anti-Protectorate proclamation written by Vavassor Powell and endorsed by the Fifth Monarchist leader John Simpson before a crowd the government’s spies reckoned at above five hundred. The Fifth Monarchists had chosen Day to read Powell’s words, later published under the title A Word for God, most likely because the “Cornet,” as his comrades still called him, was a living symbol, an iconic image of the veterans who had forged England’s republican covenants through the bloody work of war, only to be betrayed by the “apostate[s]” of the Protectorate. Citing the New Model Army’s engagements, Cornet Day declared that prerogative government under the Protectorate had “overthrow[n] . . . the very foundation of the

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commonwealth.” By “breaking up” the first Protectorate Parliament in December 1655, the regime had been better able to “effect their design” in the West Indies. “We cannot without grief mention the sad effects of the secret design of Hispaniola,” read Day to the restless audience, a venture that had led to “the loss of so many men’s lives [and] the expense of so much blood and treasure.” The rise of Cromwell’s military dictatorship and the apostates’ imperial ambitions in the West Indies had also “strengthen[ed] [the] wicked in their principles” and “provoked the Lord God to anger with our inventions.” As Day instructed his listeners, encouraging the “wicked” to “gain dominion over bodies” represented the worst of the Protectorate’s “inventions.” Powell’s damning blast condemned the Protectorate and its slave-trading supporters for “making merchandize of men” in the colonies even as they used their economic influence to corrupt the free state at home. By “hardening . . . yea . . . refreshing and justifying . . . wicked men” in these “evil doings,” the Protectorate had caused “God’s signal withdrawing from” its “designs” for American empire. Having partaken in an accursed thing by committing Achan’s sin, the Protectorate and its merchant allies had thus forfeited England’s providential favor. It would be up to the true saints, the “saving remnant,” to restore it. Soon the Protectorate regime issued warrants for Day’s, Simpson’s, and Powell’s arrest.47 Cornet Day’s reading and exhortation at All Hallows, where he referred to “Oliver Cromwell, the tyrant and usurper . . . above twenty times,” so moved Thomas Venner that he urged the faithful then and there to waste no time in taking direct action against the protector.48 John Simpson, however, released from jail in the spring of 1656, began whistling a more accommodating tune at this time, cautioning prayer and patience rather than immediate action against the Protectorate. Perhaps Simpson’s original patron, the slave-trading saint and key colonial projector Maurice Thomson, had advised him to take a more moderate course. In any case, Simpson’s cautious stance deeply offended many of his followers. Working with Wentworth Day and John Clarke, the sailor and Fifth Monarchist John Portman helped convince the dissenters in Simpson’s congregation to follow the path of direct resistance. The trail they took led straight to Swann Alley, where by the end of 1656, the breakaway faction from Simpson’s church had joined the most militant conventicles in the Fifth Monarchist movement led by the New Englanders Day, Clarke, and Venner.49 These colonists and other Fifth Monarchist leaders convened meetings where the saints expressed their anguish about the massive theft of life in the West Indies, echoing the wider popular outrage that the bloody venture

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had occasioned among the English people. The Fifth Monarchist John Rogers accused Cromwell of murder, as he had “oppressed and forsaken the poor” and “violently taken away a house which he hath builded not.” Taking the voice of the poor themselves, Rogers exclaimed that the protector had “robbed us of the benefit of our tears and our blood . . . the blood of my poor husband, the widow will say. The blood of my poor father, the orphan will say. The blood of my poor friend, many will say.”50 In March 1656, an informant made a report to Martin Noell’s brother-in-law the spymaster and secretary of state John Thurloe, which described a seditious spectacle he had witnessed on Swann Alley. Knowing that “divers young men, apprentices, and others did usually resort unto Swan-alley in Coleman-street London” to hear Venner, Day, and others preach against the protector, the spy did indeed witness “a great number of persons there met.” Following the assembly’s first two speakers, John Jones, just released from prison for expostulating with the Protectorate, “stood upon the table” and delivered a sermon “from the last clause of the last verse of the tenth chapter of Daniel.” Jones reminded the saints that Michael the archangel, “your prince,” would assist them in the apocalyptic struggle with Antichrist. “The beast,” the enslaving “Babylonish power” of the Protectorate, had overtaken England and its colonies, “sending many poor souls away beyond the seas to gain riches.” This, Jones cried, was sheer “murder,” not against one person but against “the whole nation,” making Cromwell and the Council of State guilty of mass murder. Jones’s words rang out to his Swann Alley hearers, who listened, as another Fifth Monarchist wrote, with tears glistening on their faces, remembering those that they had known, loved, and lost “beyond the seas.” Words such as these, spoken aloud in front of congregations, also made their way into the world of print, where radical writers worked to whip up support for anti-Cromwellian republicans in the Second Protectorate Parliament elections of September 1656. That month, a nameless pamphleteer lamented that tyrants had destroyed “the glory and strength of our nation” by forcing men to an early death in the Caribbean, where their lives had been “poured forth in waste like water.” The same author condemned the naval press gangs, which “barbarously forced [sailors] from their wives and children to serve the ambitious and fruitless designs of one man,” who had spilled the “blood of many thousands killed by the sword and . . . with hunger” in the West Indies. The mysterious I.S., a veteran of the Western Design, condemned the protector and his adviser in tones similar to Jones’s. In his 1656 tract The Picture of a New Courtier, I.S. wrote that the “wickedness” of the regime’s “designs, as in that of Hispan-

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iola,” and “the necessity” that Cromwell “pretended thereunto, a designed and created necessity,” had “robbed” the people and “spoiled” their lives and liberties. Linking the regime’s imperial ambitions to the sin of Achan, I.S. declared that it had “transgressed in the accursed thing.” As a preface to his tract, I.S. chose Pslam 10:9–11: “He lyeth in wait to catch the poor. He doth catch the poor when he draweth him into his net. He croucheth and humbleth himself so that the poor may fall to his strong ones. He hath said in his heart, God hath forgotten, he hideth his face, he will never see it.” Moved by “his own will, lust, and power,” the protector “manage[d] . . . his designs to enslave” the poor, whom he regarded as “superfluous members” of the commonwealth. Emptying the jails and sweeping the streets, he had shipped these unfortunates off to the West Indies, where they were “killed by Spaniards or starve[d] . . . for want of bread.” The author concluded that the “blood” of “the many slain if not all [of those who] perished . . . will lie at Cromwell’s door.”51 “These governments [have] brought forth nothing but blood monsters,” wrote a Fifth Monarchist in Venner’s cell, inverting the trope of monstrosity so often directed against the poor in a searing indictment of the revolutionary state. In meetings held late in 1656, the Fifth Monarchists reflected on how England’s political enslavement had plunged the English into a cycle of slavery and death that spanned the Atlantic world. The Protectorate’s “simonical sins,” its “principles of covetousness, . . . ambition,” and “preferment” along with its “preposterous prevarications” from revolutionary engagements, had “captivated” the nation “in bonds.” Greed for wealth, power, and prestige, “are now become law,” which made the people “slaves to serve like beasts the will and lusts of great men” in the colonies. The Fifth Monarchists remembered “their banished neighbors” forced beyond the seas into bond slavery by “buyers and sellers that are so busy now in the merchandise of slaves and souls of men.” “Whole families . . . have been devoured . . . in pressing and forcing men to the ends of the earth for gold and silver, thousands having perished.” The regime’s “frequent fastings” at Whitehall “to colour” greed-driven conquest as “a design against antichrist and his Kingdom” did not fool the saints who met with Thomas Venner.52 In addition to the tavern on Swann Alley, Venner conducted Fifth Monarchist meetings in his house near the East End docks, where most of his congregants lived. Hailing from the East End waterfront must have fueled the physical militancy of Venner’s congregation, since these neighborhoods were the most notorious among all the locales in early modern England

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as places of enslavement. Venner’s own neighborhood, Katherine’s Stairs, had earned an especially infamous reputation as a haunt for spirits. There, as the Virginia planter William Bullock reported, blue-water ship captains visited provisioning or “cook shops” engaged in the Atlantic trade, stocking up on St. Katherine’s docks on naval stores, victuals, spirits, and spirited workers. Inmates languished in these impromptu dungeons, awaiting passage to a new and usually short life of colonial bondage. A large number of these stolen beings were children, and from Venner’s house he and his followers must surely have heard the “crying and mourning” of their neighbors who pled from the riverbank for their children’s “redemption from slavery.” Waterfront crowds, made up mostly of working-class people, did not let such sordidness go unpunished.53 Perhaps nothing else could incur the rage and wrath of working people living on the docks like the discovery of a spirit at work. A petition from the Aldermen of London read: “[C]ertain persons called ‘spirits’ do inveigle and by lewd subtleties entice away youth against the consent of either of their parents, friends or masters, whereby oftimes great tumults and uproars are raised within the city to the breach of the peace and the hazard of men’s lives, being very dangerous . . .” In September 1656, an angry mob confronted Susan Jones and “called her a spirit” for attempting to sell Rebbecah Allen “beyond the seas.” The grocer Jonas Antherson waded into another London crowd that had gathered menacingly around Nicholas Cooper, saying, “[T]hou art a spirit, thou has spirited a maid to the Barbados . . . and I will call thee a spirit, till those lost vindicate thyself.” Sarah Sharpe confessed in May 1657 to putting “four persons aboard a ship” bound “for Barbados and Virginia.” Katherine Wall testified that Sharpe was “a common taker up of children, and a setter to betray young men and maidens to be conveyed into ships.” The “tearing and biting” of the children resisting their captivity had attracted a crowd’s attention to Sharpe’s attempted kidnapping. One child whom Sharpe tried to sell into slavery had barely reached the age of eleven. Press gangs were another unwelcome feature of life on the St. Katherine’s waterfront. Venner would have spied them at work from his place of employment in the Tower of London, where he and the coopers under his charge made the barrels to hold the provisions that Martin Noell had sold to the state for the Western Design. Armed guards marched thousands of impressed men down Tower Hill to the docks, where they were loaded onto ships for transport to Portsmouth and then the Caribbean. Venner would have realized by late 1655 that he had borne witness to the first stage of a horrific mass murder. During the same period, walking

im age 8. A panorama image of London painted in the mid-seventeenth century is shown here with inset images of Coleman Street Ward on the top left and the East End of London, featuring the neighborhood of St. Katherine’s, on the top right, immediately to the right of the Tower of London. Here we see vital points in the political geography of revolutionary London as it made the transition to imperial London in the midseventeenth century. Images taken from Robt. Morden and Phil. Lea, A Prospect of London and Westminster (1682), reprinted by the London Topographical Society (London, 1904); and London from Southwark, oil on wood, ca. 1630 (artist unknown), reproduced in George Sinclair, ed., Historic Maps and Views of London (London: Black Dog and Leventhal, 2009). Photos appear courtesy of The Newberry Library (Case oversize F 4595 .528 v. 15, Case folio G1819.L7S1 S55 2009).

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home from the Tower after work, Venner might have met a naval press gang assembling, for Katherine’s Stairs was the rendezvous point for the London press gang. With drawn cutlasses, officers led seamen armed with clubs up over the docks, down the lanes, and into the inns, taverns, brothels, and boarding houses of the East End to capture sailors on liberty. Unsurprisingly, press gang riots abounded in the area, making Venner and his comrades witnesses to innumerable fights, riots, escapes, and near-escapes as Londoners struggled to avoid forced labor in the army and on the high seas. Endemic conflicts of this sort turned life for the maritime working classes into a kind of intermittent low-grade warfare: life-and-death struggles raged in the city streets, hidden in plain sight. It would be hard to imagine, given his principles and his resolve to act upon them, that Venner did not play a part in the anti–press gang and spirit riots that occurred in his own neighborhood.54 Although he was a freeman of the City, Venner’s Fifth Monarchist politics displayed a class-conscious solidarity with the working people on the London waterfront who ranked below his social station— class conscious in the sense that Venner and his cohort understood how private propertied interests within the Protectorate regime guided the organization of English political and economic life at the expense of the commonality, the unpropertied people. Like the motley members of his own conventicle, Venner did not experience the challenge of how to force poor people to work against their will, either in the military or on plantations, as a perplexing problem of political economy. He knew that the work of spirits and press gangs violated the royal law of Christ, broke the covenants of the Revolution, and presented a direct threat to the lives and liberty of his neighbors and comrades. Through their own experiences, Venner and his Fifth Monarachist followers recognized that the enslavement of the English body politic had led to a slave trade of freeborn English beyond the seas. Many of those complicit in this injustice sent other ships from the same docks to enslave thousands of others from Africa; at the same time, these slave traders owned colonial estates where they again profited from the unfree labor system now endemic within the English Atlantic. Venner had lived among slaves, slave owners, and slave traders in New England, but in London, in his very own neighborhood, he lived at the epicenter of an imperial slave system as it came into being. After negotiations with other disaffected republicans failed to produce an anti-Cromwellian alliance of saints, Venner’s Fifth Monarchists decided late in 1656 to take up their “battle axes” to make “inquisition for “blood,

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and the bloodshedders” who had enslaved the “bodies and consciences” of the people to a despotic antichristian regime. “Tis the saints great duty to withdraw from this beast,” as “the Lord hath selected” his “publick spirited saints . . . to act in this work and service.” King Jesus had anointed “each one of his saints” as a prince, a “co-heir” to his kingdom on earth, investing them all with “a crown and scepter,” the symbols of their sovereign authority, to purge “this Egypt” by blood, to work “Israel’s redemption and deliverance out of this land of bondage.” Through yet another revolution of the saints, the nation would be liberated from the political slavery of kings, protectors, and corrupt councilors. This time, however, other tyrants, the ones who enslaved their fellow creatures on colonial plantations, would fall along with the rest of Antichrist’s kingdom. The saints, as they proclaimed, planned to destroy “Achan and every accursed thing.” Israel’s redeemers would, as Christ himself had in the temple, “whip the money changers, and merchants, and buyers and sellers that are so busy now in the merchandise of slaves and souls of men.” Those who made slaves of others for the sake of “filthy lucre” would be repaid in kind for the destruction they had wrought on God’s creation. The return of Christ, brought about by his saints, would bring “blood for blood.” With the general redemption and liberation following upon Armageddon, “Babylonish merchants” would “weep and howl,” for their trade in the “slaves and souls of men, will cease.” The saints proclaimed through a kidnapping metaphor that in the millennium, the slave traders who had led England into the land of bondage would “deceive the nation no more, whose souls were made slaves unto her by the cunning and deceit of her spirits.”55 In March 1657, the rebels on Swann Alley elected Thomas Venner their chief captain, collected arms and munitions, stored them with help of the “sisters” in the movement, and set their uprising for April 9. Despite careful planning, however, an informant had infiltrated their ranks. The Protectorate suppressed the rebellion before it got off the ground. Thomas Venner, John Portman, and two other plotters spent the next year in the Tower of London. William Hooke, a former Bay Colony minister who had returned to England, sent the news back across the Atlantic to John Winthrop Jr. Hooke wrote: “The conspiracy . . . was carried on by tumultuous, outrageous discontented men, pretending to fifth monarchy. . . . In this design, one Venner, not long since dwelling in your Boston, a wine cooper, is a principal actor, who, being brought before the protector, spoke and behaved himself with as great impudence, insolence pride and railing as (I think) you ever heard.” But as William Aspinwall wrote, jailing the saints

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for protesting the tyranny of the Protectorate was like “cutting off a hydra’s head.” Aspinwall could not have known how right he would be in Venner’s case. Four years later, the chief captain would be brandishing a battle-ax, leading a company of armed saints up Coleman Street on a charge against the London trained bands to free “poor prisoners” from being transported into colonial bond slavery.56

epilogue R

“Fire under the Ashes” The Atlantic Legacy of the English Revolution

on s e p t e m be r 3, 1658, Oliver Cromwell died of fever at Whitehall surrounded by friends and loved ones. His reign as lord protector had not been a happy one. By the time of his passing, “God’s Englishman” had managed to alienate almost every constituency within his political base. Invariably, when the old trooper favored one faction, he discontented others, further splintering a coalition of saints already given to fragmentation. Given that the coalition’s factions ranged from Presbyterians to Fifth Monarchists, however, the problem here owed less to Cromwell’s political acumen, or lack thereof, than to the ideological polarization within the “honest party.” Even when Cromwell made unity a main priority, his policies, instead of inspiring loyalty across the political spectrum, led the Protectorate’s many enemies to combine against it. The protracted political crisis caused by the Western Design offers a case study of the protector’s failures in this regard. With English politics in such an unsettled state, Cromwell’s death inevitably gave rise to destabilizing power struggles at Westminster and within the military.1 As these rifts began opening in March 1659, MPs conducted one of the English Revolution’s most revealing debates about the nature of freedom and slavery in the English Atlantic. The showdown that spring pitted Sir Henry Vane against the revolutionary-merchant Martin Noell, who had been condemned in a lurid petition for selling seventy-two royalist insurgents into Barbadian slavery in 1655. Noell lied through his teeth at Westminster, denying that these “servants” had a hard life on the island while announcing with hand on heart that he “abhorred” setting monetary value on “any man’s per277

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son.” Vane, in contrast, defended the freedom of his countrymen, whether rich or poor, roundhead or cavalier, against the English slave trade and its chief practitioner, Noell, surely one of the “self-interested” men Vane had in mind when he blamed Cromwell in A Healing Question for succumbing to their influence. Vane argued before the House that the plight of bond slaves, “used . . . in a barbarous manner” in the colonies, affronted “the liberty of the free born people of England.” “I would not,” Vane inveighed, have such “innovations” made upon “the rights of the people,” who must be protected against such “slavery.” Supported by several other MPs, Vane’s argument had far-reaching implications, for it loosened the foundation of unfree labor upon which England had built its political economy of empire. Rather than accepting its logic, that the commonwealth could turn domestic threats into imperial assets by enslaving its own people, Vane and his faction viewed colonial bond slavery as an “innovation,” the word being synonymous at the time with sudden, arbitrary change. “Take occasion from these ill precedents,” Vane urged the other MPs, “to make good laws.” The commonality, however, was moving faster than its representatives at Westminster. On March 20, four days before Vane’s showdown with Noell, commoners took the occasion to make man-stealers cower before the de facto court of the London crowd. In the neighborhood of St. Giles in the Fields, constables brought Captain William Staffe, “much beaten and bruised by the multitude,” before the magistrate, the crowd having executed justice on the “aged man” after John Cole, “a laborer,” accused of him of being a spirit. Such incidents highlighted in bold physical terms the conflict between the moral economy of the early modern crowd and England’s emerging political economy of empire. The contrast becomes more vivid when we note that Parliament did not, as Vane recommended, “make good laws” for the abolition of bond slavery. Man-stealing in England would not be made a capital crime for another 148 years, let alone in the lifetime of the Republic, whose fortunes were, in any case, fading fast at the time of Noell’s parliamentary hearing.2 There is no need here to retell the story, discussed in depth elsewhere, of the collapse of the commonwealth and the restoration of the Stuart dynasty. After Richard Cromwell abdicated as lord protector in May 1659, it soon became clear that it would be impossible for the revolutionary factions led by Vane, Major General Harrison, and Major General John Lambert to reach a settlement acceptable to either the godly or the nation at large. A year after the younger Cromwell’s abdication, and thanks to the decisive intervention of General George Monck, Charles II rode into London amid popular acclaim to reclaim the throne, restore the monarchy, and avenge the death of his father.3

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T hom a s Venner, freed from prison during the Rump’s brief restoration in 1659, had vengeful plans of his own. Reunited with many of the insurgents who had rallied around him in 1657, Venner quickly set his sights on raising another rebellion after the Restoration. The wine cooper simply found it impossible to live peaceably under a monarch that he found far from merry, a situation that only grew worse for Venner when the king began imprisoning and executing the regicides. Among those suffering such unenviable fates were the Coleman Streeters Owen Rowe and Isaac Pennington, who wasted away in jail while the severed heads of Hugh Peter and Major General Thomas Harrison, now impaled on the gates of London Bridge, greeted those entering the city from Southwark. But on Swann Alley, strengthened by a desperate apocalyptic idealism, Venner’s crew believed that they could topple the king and restore the Republic. As the “persevering remnant,” these self-described “poor men” would “gird on a sword for Christ” and, “abhorring mercenary principles and interests . . . , become soldiers in the Lamb’s army.” Through deliberations in the Swann Alley tavern and in Venner’s home on Katherine’s Stairs, the rebels drafted a manifesto, A Door of Hope, drawing the title from a portentous phrase in the Old Testament concerning the sin of Achan. As the prophet Hosea wrote, Joshua’s execution of Achan in the Valley of Achor opened “a door of hope” that God’s favor could be restored by exacting blood tribute for “the accursed thing” that they had allowed in their midst. Hosea likened Achan’s execution to an act of emancipation, one that would lead the faithful “out of Egypt,” a land of bondage where people had wandered during their estrangement from God. The lesson here was that the people could keep their covenant with God only by doing justice impartially; in resisting the Achans of their own times, Venner’s Fifth Monarchists believed that they could restore the Good Old Cause and thus England’s providential blessings. The door of hope thus opened to a future of true glory realized in the royal law’s fulfillment of the Mosaic covenant, which King Jesus had sealed with his own blood to redeem humanity from both inward and outward bondage. As once envisioned by the Cobbler, Samuel How, the redemptive future would be brought to fruition by the mean, poor, and obscure, who, as sovereign coheirs in the coming kingdom of Christ, would confound the wise, wealthy, and eminent as practical Christian agents of apocalyptic emancipation.4 In A Door of Hope, the Fifth Monarchists outlined how they would secure the “inward and outward man” against “every accursed thing” that might deprive the people of their liberty or godly “inheritance.” They did so through a program that fused parts of William Aspinwall’s millenarian con-

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stitution with the Leveller Large Petition and the army engagements of the summer of 1647. Beyond the customary puritan crusade against “swearing, drinking, blaspheming, whoredom, pride, lasciviousness [and] . . . stage plays,” the millenarian radicals under Venner’s command called for the abolition of the monarchy, the House of Lords, prerogative courts, constraints on liberty of conscience, the negative voice, and the practice of impressing men to serve in the military. In A Door of Hope, Venner’s rebels proclaimed that “all civil liberty” and the “rights of men” would issue forth from “the Visible Kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ,” which would be a “democracy” in “form” as long as legislation did not usurp the sovereignty of King Jesus as embodied in his royal law. Fifth Monarchists, like the Levellers before, regarded such sedition as absolutely antichristian and deserving of the kind of justice that Joshua executed against Achan.5 Like the Levellers again, the Fifth Monarchists believed that the main end of a “free state” lay in the impartial, practical Christian administration of social and economic justice. Monopolies, the excise, custom duties, tithes, and the enclosure of the commons would be abolished and something akin to Harrington’s “agrarian law” would be implemented, as the Fifth Monarchists held that an equitable distribution of property would lend political stability to a republican form of government. The “mutinous” commonality in Venner’s congregation sought, in Hakluyt’s words, an “alteration in the state” by redistributing wealth from “the fowls of prey . . . and corrupt particular persons” to ensure, in the rebels’ own words, that the “balance of lands . . . be adequate to the commonwealth.” But more reminiscent of Gerrard Winstanley than James Harrington, Venner’s cell planned to provide a “common treasury” that would ensure that families of proven fidelity to the commonwealth would remain free from the bonds of poverty. The biblical republic would succor the poor, not produce more of them as the state had by sanctioning enclosures, levying forced loans and excise taxes, and impressing men for unjust wars. No longer, in the millennial reign of Christ the King, would felons be hanged or enslaved and worked to death on colonial plantations; they would be “sold,” as the Fifth Monarchists wrote, to the commonwealth’s “workhouses,” where they would labor to pay back four times what they owed, the rate prescribed in the Mosaic Code. Since what most transported thieves stole did not add up to much in terms of pounds and pence, this meant that felons would soon be set free, rather than sent to work beyond the seas on a plantation for another’s exponential profit for as long as fourteen years. Immediately following this provision in A Door of Hope, the rebels called for the execution of man-stealers. In this free state,

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instead of growing rich through government-contracted slave trading, manstealers like Martin Noell would be strung up on the gallows.6 Venner’s rebels believed that through the Mosaic Code “the bowels of the poor, the needy, the afflicted, the languishing, the thirsty souls, the oppressed and almost devoured people, shall all be . . . revived” by the “foundation and spirit of the law,” and not by its legalistic letter. Like Samuel How and the antinomians of the 1630s, the insurgents drew their power from the sufficiency of the Holy Spirit. “All the yokes of the inward and outward man may be destroyed,” they proclaimed, “because of the anointing, holy spirit, the myrrh of liberty.” Seeing themselves as agents of millennial liberation, the rebels would risk their lives to free the commonwealth from the “human learning” that had usurped the divinely ordained liberty that resided within “particular persons” and within the “whole body of the people.” Here we see how a master wine cooper, plotting with plebeian insurgents, put the social gospel of antinomian liberation in the service of a practical Christian revolution, with the plot itself forming another chapter in the longer story of seditious resistance against arbitrary mastery that had arisen from the ranks of the early modern commonality. That Venner’s band plotted part of their design in a Coleman Street Ward public house was more than fitting, for Venner had studied the antinomian gospel under How, who had challenged his own enemies in front of the Coleman Street congregation that he had called into being at the the Nag’s Head. After the Cobbler perished in prison in 1640, the wine cooper had gone on to live a long, adventurous life that had taken him around the English Atlantic and eventually back to London, where he emerged from the Coleman Street underground to stage the last act of the English Revolution.7 On the evening of January 6, 1661, Venner and his company of East London rebels left their meeting place on Swann Alley armed with muskets, swords, pikes, and halberds. Nobody knows exactly how many joined the insurgency, but the number probably hovered somewhere between 150 and 200, with at least one woman within the group bearing arms. Wentworth Day, the most capable military man in their company, would not be joining them; the Cornet spent the time of the 1661 rising behind bars, just as he had at the time of the 1657 plot. The insurgents descended upon St. Paul’s Cathedral in marching order, scattering copies of A Door of Hope through the streets as they went. At the cathedral, which the rebels intended to transform into a fortress, they shot a man dead for declaring himself for King Charles II. The trained bands were called out, and a firefight soon was soon raging around the church’s north gate, where Colonel Cox later remem-

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bered having two soldiers under his command killed by a rebel volley that nearly took his own head off. From St. Paul’s, the rebels beat a strategic retreat out of the city through Highgate and encamped overnight in a forest at the edge of the city called Kenwood. The following day, General Monck ordered out a mounted party to take on Venner’s force; dislodging the rebels from their position, the cavalry captured thirty insurgents, although Captain Venner and most of the company managed to escape. Later that evening, Samuel Pepys recorded in a vivid diary entry that the “fanatics” had plunged London into a state of fear and panic, with authorities busily scanning crowds and searching passersby for any sign of the rebels. The King’s Guard had been raised, and hundreds of other soldiers were patrolling the city streets. But the rebels had planned well, and despite being scattered at Kenwood, they were able to regroup and take their fight to the city streets once again.8 At dawn on January 9, Pepys awoke to the news that “the fanatics were up in arms in the city.” He grabbed his pistol and ventured out into the streets, where he witnessed the trained bands rushing into action. Northwest of Pepys’s house in Seething Lane, ferocious fighting raged through the city, centering on the lanes and alleys around Poultry Street, Wood Street, and Coleman Street itself. It was no accident that the rebels converged on these locales. Both Poultry and Wood Streets hosted the infamous “Counter” or “Compter” prisons, whose inmates had besieged Parliament and the city for over half a century with petitions protesting the jails’ inhuman conditions. City officials threw vagrants, debtors, the destitute, and political dissidents into these filthy dungeons, which had become political symbols of tyranny well before Venner’s rising. The Compters, like all of London’s prisons, would also have supplied the colonies with bond slaves and military conscripts. Witnesses noted that the rebels “fell on the guard” “with mad courage” in front of the jail on Wood Street. Amid the sounds of gunshots, clashing steel, and screams of the wounded, the rebels followed their battle cry, “King Jesus and the heads on the gate!” with an appeal for the release of “the poor prisoners” from their “bondage.” Venner himself brained three men to death with a halberd in what must have been exceptionally intense hand-to-hand street fighting. Although contemporaries remarked upon the fierce determination of the rebels, it should be noted that they possessed skill as well as bravery, many having trained in colonial militias and the New Model Army. This core of veterans enabled the rebels to repel several assaults by forces many times their size. But unfortunately for the inmates of the Wood Street Compter, their would-be liberators, heavily outnumbered, could not deliver the prison.9

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Eventually beaten out of Wood Street, the rebels dissolved and drifted into the backstreets of the city, only to reappear, “like the gathering of clouds,” in different neighborhoods, with one band holing up in the Helmet tavern near Threadneedle Street while another, following Venner, retreated into the Blue Anchor at the top of Coleman Street; located near the Postern, the Blue Anchor lay only a few yards from the infamous Nag’s Head Tavern. Royalist troops soon overran the insurgents in the Helmet. More royalists under the command of Colonel Cox used musket butts to break through the rooftop tiles of the Blue Anchor, and from there poured a lethal volley into the chambers where the surviving rebels, commanded by Venner, had taken up their positions. Jumping into the room through a hole they had opened in the ceiling, the king’s soldiers shot and killed several of the wounded rebels, who refused to give up their names. Other rebels, fleeing through the warren of lanes and byways enveloping Coleman Street proper, were taken prisoner by Colonel Cox’s Life Guards and imprisoned in Newgate, although some insurgents managed to escape through the labyrinth of the ward’s back alleys. But it was at the Blue Anchor, its floors slippery with blood, that Venner and a score of men were ultimately captured. Although casualty estimates varied widely, dozens on both sides died in the frenetic fighting; dozens more were maimed and injured, with Venner himself sustaining an incredible nineteen wounds.10 The insurgents’ trials began at the Old Bailey on January 17. Wrapped in bloody bandages and seated because he could no longer stand, Venner made the Atlantic history of the rising clear, citing the “testimony” of his life in New England as a revolutionary inspiration. Two days later, in front of jeering crowds, Venner and his chief lieutenant Roger Hodgkin were dragged on a sled from Newgate through Cheapside and into Coleman Street Ward, stopping finally in Swann Alley. There the revolutionaries came to rest in front of their tavern meetinghouse, where the state had hastily erected a scaffold on which to stage a one-act drama of political terror to mortify the republican opposition. As Venner ascended the gallows, his gaze fell upon the place where he had spent much of his life in London. The scene moved him to reflect upon the cause for which he and his friends had fought as “soldiers in the Lord’s army.” Looking out over the crowd, the revolutionary proclaimed to the assembled that he would not repent because he had not sinned, a position that twenty of the other twenty-three captured rebels would also take. Instead of seeking mercy, Venner declared defiantly that it was “the duty of every saint to look for liberty.” Another time would come when men would be judged by God alone. After these words, the executioner began to dismember Venner, mutilating his genitals and drawing his

im age 9. This period illustration by a German artist incorrectly portrays the architecture of the back alleys of Coleman Street Ward where Thomas Venner and Rodger Hodgkins were executed for leading the Fifth Monarchist rebellion of 1661. The picture does accurately capture the several horrific stages by which the pair met the “traitor’s death,” which involved being dragged on a sledge to the place of execution and then being hanged, drawn, and quartered. From the perspective of the surviving rebels, however, the Fifth Monarchist captains were martyred for attempting to revive “the Good Old Cause” of the English Revolution. Image taken from Abbildung der zu Londen Vorgangenen Execution wieder die Rebellirende Quackers (Germany, 1661). Photo appears courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library (bj661 A124d 29449).

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intestines, which were burned before his living eyes. The executioner then hacked the limbs off his agonized victim. The grisly affair finally ended with Venner’s decapitation. Roger Hodgkins then met the same fate as his chief captain. Later that day, Venner’s and Hodgkins’s heads were spiked atop a rail on the south end of London Bridge. On January 21, their Fifth Monarchist confederates endured the same obscene ordeal; in all, the state executed twelve republicans in the wake of the rising. A royal official expressed the hope that this “exemplary punishment” would serve as a warning to future insurgents.11 A year later, King Charles II concluded that Sir Henry Vane was “too dangerous to live”—this despite that fact that Vane had tried to save the life of the king’s late father in 1649. At his trial, he gave an able defense of the Revolution, one that he based on the king’s reply to the Nineteen Propositions. While leaving the courtroom after his conviction, a foregone conclusion, Vane repeated Thomas Venner’s last words: “Whom man judges, God will not condemn.” Divided in their approach to overturning the Protectorate, the former colonists thus united in a final declaration of antinomian principle. The revolutionary conducted himself with honor during his last days, savoring his humanity and the integrity of his cause. On the eve of his execution, Henry Vane made love to his wife. The next day on the scaffold, Vane’s courage elicited the admiration even of royalists, who nonetheless tried to silence his speech from the scaffold. Despite the trumpet blast ordered to drown out his last words, a witness recorded that Vane left this life with a prayer of praise and thanksgiving: “I bless the Lord I have not deserted the righteous cause for which I suffer.”12 Back across the Atlantic in New England, the news of Vane’s execution must have moved Roger Williams. Nine years before, while living with Vane in Old England, Williams had written home to Rhode Island that Sir Henry had acted as the colony’s champion since the days of the antinomian controversy; since then, he had become Rhode Island’s “sheet anchor.” Williams used the maritime metaphor to explain that Vane, governing from England, had steadied Rhode Island’s rocking ship of state, holding it fast through the many battering storms that might have sent it slipping into the deep. When Williams returned to the colony in 1654, he arrived with a commission from Vane that stayed William Coddington’s dubious charter, called for the colony’s four towns to reunite under the 1647 constitution, and urged the confirmation of all laws passed by Providence and Warwick since the schism. Although we can only speculate, this could very well have been Vane’s attempt to give added force to the 1652 abolition law, given his later opposition to bond slavery.13

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While Vane bowed his head to the executioner’s ax, Martin Noell would bow his head under another blade, the sword of state wielded by King Charles II, who knighted the merchant financier in 1662 just as the royal family led by James, duke of York, began making plans to invest in the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa, Noell’s new slave-trading monopoly later reincorporated as the Royal African Company. African slave labor, as the revolutionary regime had taught its royal successor, had become the sinews of the English empire. Noell did not live very long to glory in his foul accomplishments, however, as he met his ultimate reward through the plague of 1665.14 T h e end of the Revolution generated yet another cycle of godly mobility around the Atlantic world, with a stream of revolutionaries making their way from Restoration England to join the godly in New England. Of the ninety men deemed regicides by the Restoration court, thirteen were executed and nineteen spent the rest of their days in prison. Among the latter were the Coleman Streeters Isaac Pennington and Owen Rowe, both of whom perished in 1661. The likelihood of death in a fetid prison or on a hastily erected scaffold made exile more appealing than the possibility of pardon, and a host of revolutionaries made their way out of England, many opting for the Continent while others journeyed to the colonies. The former Coleman Street pastor John Davenport made sure that New Haven lived up to its name, at least in the cases of the soldier-regicides William Goffe, John Dixwell, and Edward Whalley, who found safe refuge in the colony. In general, however, the Restoration period threw New England into a new crisis of confidence about the future of Sion (Zion) in America. Colonists wondered whether their charters would be revoked by royal edict and worried that the rising generation lacked the real stuff of sainthood. Davenport opposed one reaction to this anxiety, the “Half Way Covenant” of 1662, which abolished the conversion experience as a test for church membership in order to keep the pews full. The controversy over the Half Way Covenant split Davenport’s church in New Haven, and after this unhappy experience, the reverend elected to spend his last years in Boston, where he took the pulpit of First Church once occupied by his friend the late John Cotton, whom he had sheltered from Archbishop Laud on Coleman Street thirty years before. It’s possible that Wentworth Day planned to join the regicides in New England; he was arrested for sedition yet again in 1661 after the authorities discovered him hiding in a sailor’s house by the East End docks, perhaps waiting to board a westbound ship. Cornet Day, a literal standard

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bearer of revolution, died a year later in the Gatehouse prison. An estimated two thousand mourners turned out for his funeral procession.15 William Parsons, who had trained alongside Day and Venner in the Massachusetts militia and fought alongside the latter in London in 1661, left a more elusive legacy. Parsons somehow managed to evade capture during Venner’s rebellion. Perhaps as royalist soldiers broke their way into the taverns, he escaped out a backdoor or back window of the Blue Anchor or the Helmet and disappeared into the maze of the ward’s back lanes. While we don’t know exactly how Parsons escaped, we know that he ended up back in Boston, where he lived near the docks in a home not far from the one formerly occupied by Thomas Venner. In his old age Parsons set aside his tools to sell drinks and tell stories to those with a minute to spare in the hardworking colonial port town. He must have regaled his audiences with tales of his revolutionary life in London, for in 1702 the magistrate Samuel Sewall wrote, “Buried William Parsons today. Was in the Fifth Monarchy fray in London, but slipped away in the crowd.” Sewall, best known as a judge in the Salem witch trials, had by this time repented of his complicity in the infamous affair. He had also published The Selling of Joseph, the first full-scale condemnation of the perpetual enslavement of Africans in the English Atlantic. Sewall called the slave trade “murder” and, applying the leveling spirit of practical Christianity, demolished the religious basis for slavery by showing that the curse of Ham and the conversion of “heathens” could not serve as justifications for enslavement. As Roger Williams and Samuel Gorton had in their own condemnations of slavery, Sewall based his argument on the biblical truth that all people are the “sons of Adam . . . of one blood [made] to dwell on all the face of the earth.” Here we see how the transatlantic circulation of practical Christian radicalism during the age of the English Revolution provided a key to the language of American abolitionism as it took shape over the course of the seventeenth century.16 Quakers, who divided over the issue of slavery as they made their way around the English Atlantic world, faced witch hunts of their own as the Revolutionary era drew to a close. The Friends had sent evangelists fanning out across Britain, Ireland, the Continent, the Mediterranean, and the American colonies, spreading the antinomian gospel of the inner light to free the “inward” and “outward man” from antichristian bondage. The Maryland bond slave Charles Bayly converted to Quakerism under the tutelage of the missionary Elizabeth Harris. Back in Britain, Bayly teamed up with John Perrot, whom we have also met in this book, to free Irish Catholics in a Kilkenny prison from a future of bond slavery in the West Indies.

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In 1660, Bayly left for Italy on a mission to free Perrot from a prison in Rome. The Irish Quaker had voyaged there on a quixotic mission to preach the Catholic Church into submission. Bayly eventually ended up in England before moving back to America as an agent for the Hudson Bay Company. As for Perrot, he would travel from the Mediterranean Sea across the Atlantic Ocean and into the Caribbean, landing on Barbados, which the Quakers had begun to call “the nursery of truth” due to its expanding community of Friends. The island drew in early Quaker luminaries such as Marmaduke Stephenson, who had undergone a life-changing experience while farming in Yorkshire. Stephenson recalled that as “I walked after the plough, I was filled with the love and presence of the living God, which did ravish my heart . . . for it did increase and abound in me like a living stream.” Then “the word of the Lord came to me in a still, small voice, which I did hear perfectly, saying to me in the secret of my heart and conscience, ‘I have ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.’” Stephenson soon set sail across the Atlantic, landing in Barbados before moving on to New England, where he befriended a Quaker named William Robinson who was busy evangelizing in Rhode Island. There Robinson and Stephenson joined forces with Mary Dyer, once Anne Hutchinson’s most trusted ally, who had converted to Quakerism during her mid-1650s sojourn in England.17 In 1652 Dyer had traveled back across the Atlantic with her husband, William, who had joined Roger Williams and John Clarke to represent Rhode Island during the Coddington charter controversy. William Dyer soon left again for America, but his wife remained in England, where she quickly emerged as a fiercely dedicated Quaker. Returning to America in 1658, Mary Dyer provoked confrontations with clerics and magistrates all over New England and spent the summer and fall of 1659 targeting Massachusetts with Robinson and Stephenson. But the magistrates of Massachusetts were ready for Dyer and her Friends and allies. By October 1659, Dyer, Robinson, and Stephenson had all been sentenced to death for refusing to desist from their aggressive, even belligerent proselytizing. In a poignant display of bravery and solidarity, the three walked hand in hand to the gallows. Shocked that an older woman would walk in such a way with two younger men, the crowd tried to shame Mary Dyer. Had they known Dyer better, the scolds would have saved their breath. Dyer replied to them by saying that facing death with two sons of God caused her to glory in the spirit, for her impending martyrdom “was the greatest joy that I ever had in this world.” The executioner then hanged Stephenson and Robinson, in the former’s words, “for conscience’s sake,” but Dyer, to her dismay, received a

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last-minute reprieve. She returned to Boston the next spring, as she said, to redeem the Bay Colony from the “blood-guiltedness” of laws that enforced “banishment upon pain of death” for dissenters, laws that had been driving antinomians from Massachusetts since the days when Dyer and Hutchinson defiantly faced the inquisition sponsored by John Winthrop, Thomas Shepard, and John Wilson. Winthrop and Shepard had long since died, but Wilson lived long enough to ask Dyer to retract and repent once again, this time at the foot of the hangman’s tree. Dyer refused, again, and died the death she had chosen. Gazing upon the execution scene, one of her inquisitors, Humphrey Atherton, who years earlier had helped besiege the Gortonists at Shawomet, remarked that “Mary Dyer did hang as a flag for others to take example by.” Having lived through the age of the English Revolution, Atherton should not have been oblivious, as he obviously was, to the irony of his words, as religious persecution had only emboldened dissent around the English Atlantic.18 Fate proved kinder to other New England radicals. Richard Saltonstall the younger fled Coleman Street once again after the Restoration and returned to New England, where he raised money to support both Harvard College and the regicides hiding out in Connecticut. Saltonstall seemed incapable of staying long in one place, however, and made several trips back to Old England, where he died in 1686. The Rhode Islander Samuel Gorton passed away in 1677. He would not be forgotten, as the president of Yale University, Ezra Stiles, discovered a century later when talking with Jonathan Angell. Holding Gorton’s works in his hand, Angell told Stiles that Gorton wrote “in heaven” and that “no man could read or understand” his books “unless he was in heaven.” The mystic Angell, a fervent antinomian, held Gorton in the highest regard, calling him “a holy man who wept day and night for the sins and blindness of the world, his eyes were a fountain of tears. . . . [He was] beloved by all his neighbors and the Indians who esteemed him not only a friend but one high in communion with God and heaven.” Gorton’s political ally during the Revolutionary era, John Clarke, distanced himself from Thomas Venner in the wake of the rebellion, a move that ultimately enabled him to secure a charter from Charles II guaranteeing liberty of conscience for Rhode Island, where he returned from England in 1663. But before he left, it’s possible that he was the John Clarke who petitioned the king in 1660 “[f ]or letters patent to keep a Register Office for all servants and children to be transported to Virginia and Barbados, to which office all shall be brought under penalty to declare their willingness to go in order to prevent the abuses of forcible transportation of persons

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without their own or their parents’ consent.” Back in New England, Clarke devoted the rest of his life to the practice of medicine and the gathering of Baptist churches in both New and Old England, corresponding with Coleman Street preachers until his death in 1676.19 Clarke died of natural causes in the midst of King Philip’s War, the bloodiest conflict in seventeenth-century colonial North America. The war’s two major causes, settler land hunger and militant missionary work among the Indians, had long been assailed by Roger Williams as “accursed things” that crossed the royal law of Christ. Williams believed that God’s word should be preached to the Indians, but he opposed the racially charged missionary work under way in the Bay. Indeed, he worried that John Eliot’s fear-mongering evangelization among the Indians would destroy more souls than it would save. In 1654, three years after Eliot established his first town of “praying Indians” at Natick, Narragansetts petitioned Williams for help in fending off an evangelical onslaught by Eliot’s converts, who preached that if the Narragansetts did “not pray they would be destroyed by war.” Williams had called this kind of ministry “soul rape,” and he feared that providential retribution for the “national sins” of land expropriation and forced conversion would come in the way of war, a “terrible beast” that “spits fire and spreads fire, and sets the towns on fire and the whole colony also.”20 Before King Philip’s War broke out in the summer of 1675, the “New England firebrand” had thought settlers and Indians could journey together out of the figurative “wilderness” by leaving behind their mutual savageries to embrace the savor of civility that existed in their respective cultures. Despite all his efforts, it must have seemed to Williams that savagery had ultimately prevailed among the barbarians of New England, both Christian and native. In March 1676, he watched helplessly as a raiding party of Philip’s forces torched his home, the burning embers drifting heavenward, carrying his dreams of a peaceable kingdom into oblivion.21 Yet there was a fire burning under the ashes, a combustible set of ideas and even a revolutionary tradition that Williams had done more than any other to kindle. In defiant exasperation he once said, “I have been charged with folly for that liberty and freedom which I have always stood for.” Time would redeem Williams, whose principles of republican liberty and religious toleration would become ideological staples a century later in the age of Atlantic revolutions. But yet in his defense of Native American rights, Williams saw farther than even the latter-day revolutionaries, who in the new nations they formed in the Americas forcibly encroached upon Indian lands, often with an eye to expanding slave economies. When Williams re-

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ferred to the “folly” that he stood for, he spoke specifically to his notion of “liberty and equality in land and government.” He meant this in two senses. First, colonists and Indians should remain, as sovereign equals, at liberty in their own lands, free from external subjugation. Second, while he could have claimed most of the territory around the Narragansett Bay as his own since he had personally brokered most of the region’s settler-Indian land deals, Williams parceled out the holdings, at little gain to himself, recognizing that an equitable distribution of resources provided the necessary material basis for people to realize the blessings of liberty. Such thinking became a salient feature of the most radical variants of transatlantic republicanism in the age of the English Revolution, as Levellers and Fifth Monarchists also adopted this materialist approach to the practical Christian ends of commonwealth government. Additionally, Williams repeatedly and often eloquently rejected racialized justifications for the expropriation of Indian land and the enslavement of Indian bodies, processes that became instrumental to establishing and constructing the material and culturally racialized foundations of colonization. Moreover, and most important, history has shown us that Williams’s “folly” remains as dangerous today as it was in the seventeenth century. The links the radical made between material equity, political sovereignty, and civil liberty confound the ideological pretenses of neoliberalism and stand directly at odds with the inequitable proliferation of global capitalism in the twenty-first century. It seems that Roger Williams still has much to teach us about the cost of divorcing republican ideals from social and economic justice.22 Wi l l i a m s ’s remarks about his alleged “folly” involve more than a frustrated defense of first principles, for they contain an echo of the dialectical legacy of the English Revolution, which with one vital exception remains unrecognized by scholars.23 On one side of this dialectic stands the combined power of capital and the state. Although members of the pantheon of republican writers turned to humanism and scripture to align the revolutionary state’s imperial ambitions with Protestant, republican virtue, the political and economic elite at Westminster and Whitehall turned directly to violence, seeing conquest in Ireland, war with the Dutch on the high seas, and the invasion of the Spanish West Indies as the best means to create an Atlantic empire of godly liberty, one that would profit the commonwealth and perfect the Protestant Reformation. Cromwell’s personal motto, pax quartier bello, or “peace through war,” neatly sums up this ideology, where those fortunate enough to be conquered by the empire of saints would re-

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ceive the saving grace of militant Protestantism and the glory of English liberty and civility. In reality, millions from Europe, America, and Africa would ultimately experience the expansion of the empire through conquest, slavery, and death. The horrific violence that empire building, via warfare and commercial and plantation capitalism, unleashed around the Atlantic undermined the ethos of political freedom, Christian virtue, and peaceful commerce so rife in the rhetoric of English imperialism, rooted as it was in humanist thought. Beyond Protestantism, civility, and liberty lay lucre, the pursuit of which more than anything else animated English imperial expansion. The prosperity the empire generated for some meant the end of liberty for the motley multitude. All too often it also led to the end of life itself, as imperial wars and colonial slavery would ultimately cause the violent, unjust, and unnecessary deaths of millions of people from around the Atlantic world. And so a revolution that began with saints seeking England’s freedom from the mastery of Antichrist ended with their bid to make themselves masters of the world by reducing human beings from around the Atlantic world to various forms of chattel property. Seventeenth-century English political economy of the sort articulated by William Petty laid the ideological foundations for the empire that the English actually built, which departed in many ways from the one envisioned earlier by Richard Hakluyt. But political economy would be outshone in the public eye by the dark star of imperial rhetoric, the language of liberty that turned the history of English empire building into a myth, a providentially ordained pageant of Christian virtue, political liberty, and commercial prosperity. The imperial legacy that the revolutionaries left their royal successors, the one of lived experience rather than national myth, ensured instead that England’s commercial and plantation empire could operate only through the massive coercion, terrorization, exploitation, and brutalization of workers from around the Atlantic world, the vast majority of them being permanently enslaved Africans. In most histories of the English (and later British) empire, the attendant deathdealing consequences of political and economic expansion have rarely appeared in their shockingly tragic scale. Instead, the country’s ascent as a world power is usually portrayed as an intellectual journey, a political discourse, an administrative accomplishment, a commercial adventure, or a Protestant crusade. For a reality-based appreciation of the imperial legacy of the English Revolution in particular, and more generally for the integrity of our collective historical conscience, the labor history of the motley Atlantic commonality must be brought out of the shadows and into the light

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of historical consciousness, to be integrated with the history of empire and global capitalist expansion. Most importantly, such a synthesis can serve in our own time as a flesh-and-blood historical foil against the false lure of capitalist rhetoric and imperial mythology. To make such an argument is not an exercise in anachronism, as people from around the English Atlantic condemned the violence, tyranny, and corruption at the heart of English expansion in the Revolutionary era. In their own day, radicals in England and the colonies saw these evils as the bitter fruit of a reformation corrupted and a revolution betrayed. Their republican ideals, infused with the principles of common equity that gave life to the Good Old Cause around the Atlantic, developed dialectically with the imperial progress of the English Revolution. The legacy of liberty that the radicals left behind defined itself against political slavery in both its embodied and disembodied forms; unlike others of their age, however, they defined liberty from these forms of political slavery as natural and divine rights rather than select privileges based on religion, race, and class status. The radicals discussed here saw the malignancy of political slavery metastasizing around the body politic of the English Atlantic through unjust wars of colonial conquest waged both by settlers and the English state. They linked the spread of political slavery to the expansion of economic slavery, and condemned both forms of bondage. While the Bay Colony’s Richard Saltonstall became the first English person to legally challenge the transatlantic trade in African slaves, the Rhode Island Assembly, two years before the Western Design, passed the first law in the English Atlantic to abolish both bond and perpetual slavery. Their Fifth Monarchist peers in Coleman Street Ward made slave trading, or man-stealing, a capital offense and, before launching a rebellion to free prisoners destined for colonial bond slavery, prophesied that the slave trade itself would be destroyed through God’s apocalyptic vengeance on England’s revolutionary apostates. Assessing the collective efforts of these radicals around the Atlantic, we see how they resulted in the most impressive intellectual breakthrough in the age of the English Revolution: the conviction that the political freedom of some could not be justly built upon the economic enslavement of others. Recognizing this profound contribution to the history of human liberty remains impossible without an Atlantic view of the English Revolution. Throughout the book, Coleman Street Ward has served as the lens through which I have explored some of the more significant dimensions of the English Revolution’s wide-ranging history. Residents of the ward made instrumental contributions not only to the outbreak and progress of the

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Revolution but also to the ideological polarization that helps explain its ultimate failure. Indeed, revolutionaries from the ward played crucial parts in the interrelated rise of the Atlantic economy, English colonization, the proliferation of chattel slavery, and the advent of the empire. At the same time, the rise of radical republicanism in the English Revolution cannot be divorced from the influence of events in the colonies and the circulation of colonial radicals through the ward and around the English Atlantic. The ward’s transatlantic history reveals how some of the figures who passed through its radical underground helped make possible the transcendental leap into a new era of abolitionist political thought and action. In the Fifth Monarchist manifesto A Door of Hope, Venner’s rebels prophesied that their insurgency would “break out in flames . . . like fire under the ashes” of the failed revolution. But the insurgents lost the battle for London, the forces ranged against them being too powerful to overcome. Yet as the Fifth Monarchists wrote in A Door of Hope and as the motley crews of the eighteenth-century Atlantic revolutions later affirmed, the struggles against “every accursed thing” were “much more than a national quarrel,” for they unfolded not in a nation but around the Atlantic, “the market place of the world.” The printing press became crucial in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century struggles against political and economic slavery, but the words on the page came to life only through the action of people of many colors whose freedom stories unfolded on the land and on the sea. Their efforts were rarely lauded in the salons and universities of the literati. But these locations did not form, according to the Fifth Monarchists, “the very stage of action” where the people would be delivered from bondage. Instead, the life-and-death struggle between freedom and slavery, in all of its many forms, would unfold in the years to come in the Irish hedge school, the Shawnee longhouse, the Jamaican slave cabin, the African barracoon, the Boston tavern, the Bristol docks, the dissenter’s chapel, the prison, the battlefield, the scaffold, the slave ship, and the “streets of the cities” encircling the Atlantic world.24

Notes

introduction 1. A Relation or History of the Rise and Suppression of the Fifth Monarchy within the Kingdom of England, the Chief of which Sect was one Thomas Venner, a Wine Cooper (London, 1661), reprinted in Ephraim Paget, Heresiography (London, 1662), 285. 2. Laurence Echard, The History of England (London, 1707), 104; Samuel Pepys, quoted in P. G. Rogers, The Fifth Monarchy Men (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 114 –16. 3. “A Relation of the Arraignment and Trial of those who made the late Rebellious Insurrection in London, 1661,” in Sir Walter Scott, ed., A Collection of the Most Scarce and Valuable Tracts on the Most Interesting and Entertaining Subjects: but Chiefly as Such that Relate to the History and Constitution of these Kingdoms. Selected from an Infinite Number in Print and Manuscript, in the Royal, Cotton, Sion, and other Private, as Well as Public Libraries; Particularly that of the Late Lord Sommers (London, 1809 –15), 4:470, cited hereafter as Somers Tracts; The Last Speech and Prayer, with Other Passages of Thomas Venner (London, 1660), A2 –6; A Door of Hope (London, 1661), 2 – 4; Thomas Birch, ed., A Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe (London, 1742), 7:184 –87. 4. “A Relation,” Somers Tracts, 4:470. 5. Thomas Hobbes, Behemoth, or the Long Parliament (London, 1681). Hobbes wrote the book in the 1660s, but it was refused publication by Charles II in 1668. For a summary of the historiography of the English Revolution, see R. C. Richardson, The Debate on the English Revolution (New York: Manchester University Press, 1977, 1988, 1998); Nicholas Tyacke, “Introduction : Locating the ‘English Revolution,’” in Tyacke, ed., The English Revolution c. 1590–1720 : Politics, Religion and Communities (New York: Manchester University Press, 2007), 1–26. Also helpful are the introduction by Lyndal Roper and Laura Gowing and articles by Quentin Skinner, John Walter, Rachel Judith Weil, and Anne Hughes in the forum titled “Rethinking the English Revolution,” which appeared in History Workshop Journal 61 (Spring 2006). 6. John Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution: Essays by John Morrill (London: Longmans, 1993). 7. On this subject, see Ian Gentles, The English Revolution and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, 1638–1652 (Harlow, Essex, UK: Pearson Longman, 2007); David Scott, Politics and War in the Three Stuart Kingdoms, 1637–1649 (Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 8. Among the members of this group may be found Maurice Abbott, Thomas Alderne, John

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Davenport, John Eaton, Theophilus Eaton, Edward Hopkins, Isaac Pennington, Martin Noell, Owen Rowe, James Russell, and Thomas Wroth. 9. This cohort also included, among others, Katherine Hadley, Thomas Lambe, John Lilburne, Richard Overton, Nicholas Tew, John Walls, and a woman known to us now only as Mrs. Attaway. 10. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon, 2001).

chapter one 1. Robert Chambers, ed., The Book of Days: A Miscellany of Popular Antiquities, 2 vols. (London, 1832), 1:204. 2. Michael R. Watts, The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), 69; Champlin Burrage, The Early English Dissenters in Light of Recent Research, 1540–1641, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1912), 2:317. 3. One hostile and one friendly source, both broadsheets, estimated that the crowd at the Nag’s Head exceeded one hundred. See, respectively, The Cobbler Vindicated (London, 1640) and The Cobbler’s Thread is Cut, or The Cobbler’s Monument (London, 1640). 4. Samuel How, The Sufficiency of the Spirits Teaching Without Human Learning, or A Treatise Tending to Prove Human Learning to be no Help to the Spiritual Understanding of the Word of God (London, 1644), D. 5. Ibid. 6. For a hostile contemporary account of the crowd at the Nag’s Head, see John Taylor, A Swarm of Sectaries, and Schismatics: Wherein is Discovered the Strange Preaching (or Prating) of Such as are by their trades Cobblers, Tinkers, Peddlers, Weavers, Sow-Gelders and Chimney Sweepers (London, 1641), 2 –10. 7. How, Sufficiency of the Spirits Teaching, B2. 8. Ibid., 1; The Cobbler’s Thread is Cut, n.p. 9. Alfred Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), 5. For puritanism, humanism, and social thought, see Margo Todd, Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 10. By “class-conscious,” I simply mean that (1) contemporaries recognized that they belonged to a specific class or order within the English social order, (2) these classes or orders existed in unequal relationships with one another, and (3) these relationships, economic, political, and social, were organized from the top down in line with the interests of the propertied classes at the top of the socioeconomic hierarchy. 11. Minutes of the Court of Governors, Bethlehem Royal Hospital, BCB-6, July 1617–March 1627, fol. 101. My thanks to Paul Griffiths for his generous help in locating this source. 12. Alison Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999, 2001), 14; George Vito, “A Note on the Population of Seventeenth Century London,” Demography 9, no. 3 (1972): 511–14. 13. John Winthrop, “Common Grievances Groaning for Reformation,” in C. Ford Worthington, ed., The Winthrop Papers, 1498–1628, 5 vols. (Boston : Massachusetts Historical Society, 1929), 1:295; Steward Mitchell, ed., The Winthrop Papers, 1623–1628, 5 vols. (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1931), 2:112, 115, 122 –23. 14. Paul Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Longman, 1988). For more on the lives of the poor in early modern London, see Robert O. Bucholz and Joseph P. Ward, London: A Social and Cultural History, 1550–1750 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), chap. 6. 15. For work connecting vagrancy to capitalist economic innovations, particularly enclosure,

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see Thomas More, More’s Utopia: The English Translation thereof by Ralphe Robynson (London, 1556); Ellen Meiksins Wood and Neal Wood, A Trumpet of Sedition: Political Theory and the Rise of Capitalism, 1509–1688 (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 13 –19; Geoff Kennedy, Diggers, Levellers, and Agrarian Capitalism: Radical Political Thought in Seventeenth Century England (New York; Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), 59 –98; Nicholas Blomely, “Making Private Property: Enclosure, Common Right and the Work of Hedges,” Rural History 18, no. 1 (2007): 1–21. For the transition to wage labor, see Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 197. For the ideological prejudices embedded in the language of vagrancy, see Patricia Fumerton, Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Fumerton judiciously proposes substituting the phrase “the mobile working poor” for the word vagrants. 16. Edwin Freshfield, Some Remarks upon the Book of Records and History of the Parish of Coleman Street, in the City of London (Westminster: Nicholas and Son, 1887) , A; D. A. Kirby, “The Radicals of St. Stephen’s, Coleman Street,” in The Guildhall Miscellany (London, 1971), 98; Daniel Defoe, The History of the Great Plague in London, in the Year 1665 (London, 1754), A, 102, 105; John Stow, A Survey of London (London, 1603; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon, 1908), 1:284; Thomas Dekker, The Seven Deadly Sins of London (London, 1606), in A. B. Grosart, ed., Non-dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, 5 vols. (1884 –86), 2:50, quoted in Paul Griffiths, Lost Londons: Change, Crime, and Control in the Capital City, 1550–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 36. 17. Dudley Digges, The Defense of Trade, in a Letter to Sir Thomas Smith, Governor of the East India Company (London, 1615), 2 –3; Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon, 2001), 35 – 40. 18. E. B. Sainsbury, ed., A Calendar of the Court Minutes . . . of the East India Company, 11 vols. (1907–38), 1:vi-xii, xx, xxiv-xxvi; W. Foster, ed., The Travels of John Sanderson in the Levant, 1584–1602 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1931), 252; Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 78, 81n, 88, 101n, 223; Andrew Thrush, “Abbot, Sir Maurice (1565 –1642),” in Lawrence Goldman, ed., Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; online ed. 2008), hereafter DNB Online (2008). 19. For more on the global context of Atlantic colonization, see Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 47–116; Karen Ordahl Kupperman, The Jamestown Project (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 1–72. Beginning in the Elizabethan period and through at least the middle of the seventeenth century, English merchants pursued colonization ventures not just in the Americas but in Africa as well, particularly off the coast of Madagascar on the island of Assada. See Brenner, Merchants and Revolutionaries, 118, 171–73, 192 –93, 522; and William Foster, “An English Settlement in Madagascar in 1645 –1646,” English Historical Review 26 (1912): 239 –50. For more on Abbot, Rich, and other colonial entrepreneurs of the period, see Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 93 –102, 148 – 49, 153 –56; A. P. Newton, Colonizing Activities of the English Puritans: The Last Phase of the Elizabethan Struggle with Spain (1914; rpt. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1966), 18 –21; Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 108 –30; April Lee Hatfield, Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), 39 –85; William Foster, “The East India Co., 1600–1740,” in H. H. Dodwell, ed., The Cambridge History of the British Empire, vol. 4, British India, 1497–1858 (New York: Macmillan, 1929), 76 –116; John C. Appleby, “War, Politics, and Colonization, 1558 –1625,” in Nicholas Canny, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Origins of Empire—British Overseas Ex-

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pansion to the Close of the Seventeenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, 2001), 73 –74; Sean Kelsey, “Rich, Robert, Second Earl of Warwick (1587–1658),” DNB Online (2008). 20. Thrush, “Abbot, Sir Maurice,” DNB (2008); Isabel Macbeath Calder, The New Haven Colony (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1934), 19. For Abbot’s election to London’s Common Council, see London Metropolitan Archives, Mss 4458, part 1, entry for January 21, 1622. 21. Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum: The Manner of Government or Policy of the Realm of England (London, 1583), bk. 10:57, 59; Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 76 –77; Patrick Collinson, “The Monarchical Republic of Elizabeth I,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 69 (1987), 407; Thomas Smith, De Republica Anglorum, or History with the Politics Put Back (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 18 – 45; Markku Peltonen, “Citizenship and Republicanism in Elizabethan England,” in Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner, eds., Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage. 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1:85 –87; Wood and Wood, Trumpet of Sedition, 48 – 49. For more on contemporary thinking regarding commonwealth government and early modern corporate citizenship, see Whitney Richard David Jones, The Tree of Commonwealth,1450–1793 (London: Associated University Presses, 2000), 85 –143; Phil Withington, The Politics of Commonwealth: Citizens and Freemen in Early Modern England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 22. Smith, De Republica Anglorum, bk. 10:57; Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra, 40– 49; Armitage, Ideological Origins of Empire, 47–51; C. S. L. Davies, “Slavery and the Protector Somerset: The Vagrancy Act of 1547,” Economic History Review 19 (1966): 33 – 49; David Beers Quinn, “Sir Thomas Smith (1513 –1577) and the Beginnings of English Colonial Theory,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 89, no. 4 (1945): 543 –60; Hiram Morgan, “The Colonial Venture of Sir Thomas Smith in Ulster, 1571–1575,” Historical Journal 28, no. 2 (1985): 261–78; FitzWilliam, quoted in Robert Pentland Mahaffy, ed., Calendar of State Papers Relating to Ireland Preserved in the Public Record Office, 1647–1660, Addenda 1625–1660 (London, 1903), 359. For work that leaves colonial ideology regarding Ireland and the wider Atlantic within a realm of humanist discourse that makes the colonizers appear to have nothing at heart but the best interest of the people they sought to subjugate, see Andrew Hadfield, “Irish Colonies and the Americas,” in Robert Applebaum and John Wood Sweet, eds., Envisioning an English Empire: Jamestown and the Making of the North Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 172 –94 (176 for Thomas Smith in particular). 23. This section draws heavily on Peter Linebaugh’s The Magna Charta Manifesto: Liberty and Commons for All (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 46 –93. Also see Andy Wood, “‘Poore Men Woll Speke One Daye’: Plebian Languages of Deference and Defiance in England, c. 1520–1640,” in Tim Harris, ed., The Politics of the Excluded, c. 1500–1850 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 67–98. 24. Richard Hakluyt, A Particular Discourse Concerning the Great Necessity and Manifold Commodities that are Like to Grow to this Realm of England by the Western Discoveries Lately Attempted (commonly referred to as A Discourse on Western Planting; 1583), reprinted in David B. Quinn and Allison M. Quinn, eds., Discourse of Western Planting (London: Hakluyt Society, 1993), no. 4; Andy Wood, Riot, Rebellion, and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001); R. W. Hoyle, The Pilgrimage of Grace and the Politics of the 1530s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 102, 427, 425; David Rollison, “The Specter of the Commonality: Class Struggle and the Commonweal in England before the Atlantic World,” William and Mary Quarterly 63, no. 2 (2006), 233, 234, 243; A Commonwealth of the People: Popular Politics and England’s Long Social Revolution, 1066–1649 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 25. Steve Hindle, “Imagining Insurrection in Seventeenth-Century England: Representations of the Midland Rising of 1607,” History Workshop Journal 66, no. 1 (2008): 21–61.

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26. For a famous account of the problem of popular political unrest in the early modern England, see Francis Bacon, “Of Seditions and Troubles,” in The Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral, of Francis Lo. Verulam, Viscount St. Alban (London, 1625), 76 –90; Hakluyt, Discourse on Western Planting, no. 4. Hakluyt’s manuscript remained unpublished until it appeared in Leonard Wood’s edited A Documentary History of the State of Maine, vol. 2 (Cambridge, 1877). 27. Christopher Tomlins, Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 21. 28. Hakluyt, Discourse on Western Planting, nos. 4, 12, 13, 14, 20, 21; Kenneth MacMillan, Sovereignty and Possession in the English New World: The Legal Foundations of Empire, 1576–1640 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 123 –32, and “Benign and Benevolent Conquest? The Ideology of Elizabethan Atlantic Expansion Revisited,” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 9, no. 1 (2011): 51. For impressive work on Hakluyt that tries to reconstruct his thinking within biographical and wider historical contexts, see Peter Mancall, Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). 29. For more on the link between humanism, colonization, and England’s domestic and foreign problems, see Andrew Fitzmaurice, “The Civic Solution to the Crisis of English Colonization, 1609 –1625,” Historical Journal 42, no. 1 (1999): 25 –51, and Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of English Colonization, 1500–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). As pages 21–24 of this chapter reveal, my interpretation does not follow Fitzmaurice in reducing the motives for colonization to civic humanist ideals. My interpretation here also sits at odds with Christopher Tomlins, who in this respect largely follows Fitzmaurice’s lead in Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 263. 30. John Donne, “A Sermon Preached to the Honorable Company of the Virginian Plantation” (1622), in Donne’s Sermons, ed. Logan Pearsall Smith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1920), 51; For more on Donne, the poor, and English expansion, see Tom Caine, “John Donne and the Ideology of Colonization,” English Literary Renaissance 31, no. 3 (2001): 440–76. 31. Susan Myra Kingsbury, ed., The Records of the Virginia Company of London: The Court Book from the Manuscript in the Library of Congress, 4 vols. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1906), 1: 259, 284, 288; cited hereafter as Records of the Virginia Company. 32. April Lee Hatfield, Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 39 –59; Alison Games, The Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 81–86; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 93 –102; Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 108 –30; Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo America, 2 vols. (New York: Verso, 1997), 1:47–96; Marcy Norton and Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert, “The Multinational Commodification of Tobacco, 1492 –1650: An Iberian Perspective,” in Peter C. Mancall, ed., The Atlantic World and Virginia, 1550–1624 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 251–73. 33. J. V. Lyle, ed., Acts of the Privy Council of England, vol. 37, 1619–1621 (London, 1931), 118; Robert C. Johnson, “The Transportation of Vagrant Children from London to Virginia, 1618 –1622,” in Howard S. Reinmuth Jr., ed., Early Stuart Studies: Essays in Honor of David Harris Willson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1970), 137–51. 34. Lyle, ed., Acts of the Privy Council of England, 37:118; Johnson, “Transportation of Vagrant Children from London to Virginia,” 142 – 43; Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra, 59. Others beside the poor of London were being sent against their will to work in Virginia. In December 1620, the Irish of escheated estates in Wexford were imprisoned while others were sent to Virginia “in order to terrify” other Irish who might “trouble the King or their Lordships.” See Charles W. Russell and John P. Prendergast, eds., Calendar of State Papers of Ireland ,1615–1625 (London: Longman, 1880), 307.

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35. Allen, Invention of the White Race, 1:84 –86; Kingsbury, ed., Records of the Virginia Company, 3:357; Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 127; Donne, “A Sermon Preached to the Honorable Company of the Virginian Plantation,” in Smith, ed., Donne Sermons, 52. 36. Kingsbury, ed., Records of the Virginia Company, 2:478, 483; 4:102, 221–23; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 118 –20; James D. Rice, “Escape from Tsenacommacah: Chesapeake Algonquians and the Powhatan Menace,” in Peter C. Mancall, ed., The Atlantic World and Virginia, 1550–1624 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 137. 37. The king had long before turned his back on puritan religiosity when he rebelled as a schoolboy against his Calvinist tutor, the tellingly anti-absolutist James Buchanan. From 1618 to 1622, James appeared bent on plunging the Protestant nation into an unhappy union with Catholic Spain by blessing the attempt to marry the royal heir Charles to the Infanta Isabella, a star-crossed project launched by the king’s favorite, George Villiers, the duke of Buckingham. Thomas Coggswell, English Politics and the Coming of War, 1621–1624 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989, 2005), 1–50; “Commons Petition and Remonstrance, 1621,” in John Rushworth, ed., Historical Collections . . . Beginning in the Sixteenth Year of King James, Anno 1618 and Ending the Fifth Year of King Charles, Anno 1629, 3 vols. (London, 1659 –82), 1:40, quoted in Scott, England’s Troubles, 89; Peter Lake, “Constitutional Consensus and Puritan Opposition in the 1620s: Thomas Scott and the Spanish,” Historical Journal 25, no. 4 (1982): 805 –25. 38. J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 184 –218. For work that broke new ground in recognizing anti-Spanish militant Protestantism as a crucial component of early English imperial thought, see Armitage, Ideological Origins of the British Empire, 61–99. Also see David A. Boruchoff, “Piety, Patriotism, and Empire: Lessons for England, Spain, and the New World in the Works of Richard Hakluyt,” Renaissance Quarterly 62, no. 3 (Fall 2009): 809 –58. For the apocalyptic dimensions of militant Protestant justifications for colonial expansion, see John C. Coombs, “The Phases of Conversion: A New Chronology of Slavery in Early Virginia,” William and Mary Quarterly 68, no. 3 (2011): 338 –39; David Harris Sacks, “Richard Hakluyt’s Navigations in Time: History, Epic and Empire,” Modern Language Quarterly 67, no. 1 (2006): 31–62; Douglas Bradburn, “The Eschatological Origins of the English Empire,” in John C. Coombes and Douglas Bradburn, eds., Early Modern Virginia: Reconsidering the Old Dominion (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 15 –56. 39. Hakluyt, Discourse on Western Planting, pts. 7, 11, 12, 20.16, 20.18. For more on the Black Legend, see MacMillan, “Benign and Benevolent Conquest?,” 48 – 49; Jonathan Locke Hart, The English and French Uses of the Example of Spain (New York: Palgrave, 2000), 101, 103 –6; Edmund Valentine Campos, “West of Eden: American Gold, Spanish Greed, and the Discourses of English Imperialism,” in Margaret R. Greer, Walter D. Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan, eds., Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 247–69. 40. Virginia Bernhard, “Bermuda and Virginia in the Seventeenth Century: A Comparative View,” Journal of Social History 19, no. 1 (1985): 57–70; Boies Penrose, “Some Jacobean Links between America and the Orient,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 48, no. 4 (1940): 289 –303; W. Noel Sainsbury, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, 1574–1660 (London, 1860), 17, hereafter CSPC 1574–1660; Ronald Takaki, “The Tempest in the Wilderness: The Racialization of Savagery,” Journal of American History 79, no. 3 (1992): 892 –912. 41. Newton, Colonizing Activities of the English Puritans, 23; Engel Sluiter, “New Light on the ‘20. and Odd Negroes’ Arriving in Virginia, August 1619,” William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 2 (1997): 395; John Smith, The Genera History of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles (London, 1624), in Lyon Gardiner Tyler, ed., Narratives of Early Virginia, 1606–1625 (New York: Charles Scribner and Son, 1907), 337. 42. Sainsbury, ed., CSPC 1574–1660, 63; Kingsbury, ed., Records of the Virginia Company,

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4:490– 491; Rush, “Abbot, Sir Maurice,” in DNB Online (2008); Brenner, Merchants and Revolutionaries, 100–102; “The Earl of Warwick, a Speculator in Piracy,” Hispanic American Historical Review 10, no. 4 (November 1930): 457–79. 43. Piracy figured in the plans of Virginia’s colonial undertakers in ways that have yet to be fully appreciated. On August 22, 1609, Sir Richard Moryson wrote to the earl of Salisbury from the Cork harbor town of Youghall, proposing that Irish pirates, always a plague to the crown, be sent across the Atlantic in eleven ships, one thousand strong, in order to pillage the Spanish empire to acquire provisions sorely needed for Virginia. See C. W. Russell and John P. Prendergast, eds., Calendar of State Papers Ireland, 1608–1610 (London, 1874; rpt. 1974), 278. For more on piracy and the advent of a labor system based on the enslavement of African people and their descendants, see Coombs, “Phases of Conversion,” 338 – 43. 44. For more on puritan thought regarding the affinity of constitutions civil and ecclesiastic, see Michael Winship, “Freeborn (Puritan) Englishmen and Slavish Subjection: Popish Tyranny and Puritan Constitutionalism, c. 1570–1606,” English Historical Review 124, no. 510 (2009): 1050–74, quote 1051. Also see J. S. Maloy’s important book on puritan political ideas: The Colonial Origins of Modern Democratic Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 86 –113, 140–61. 45. David A. Kirby, “The Radicals of St. Stephen’s, Coleman Street, London, 1624 –1642,” Guildhall Miscellany 3, no. 2 (1970): 101, 106; Elizabeth Macbeath Calder, The New Haven Colony (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1934), 34; Edwin Atwater, A History of the Colony of New Haven (New York, 1881), 30. 46. Kenneth Fincham, “‘According to Ancient Custom’: The Return of Altars in the Restoration Church of England,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, ser. 6, 13 (2003): 29 –54; Anthony Milton, “The Creation of Laudianism: A New Approach,” in Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust, and Peter Lake, eds., Politics, Religion, and Popularity in Early Stuart Britain: Early Stuart Essays in Honour of Conrad Russell (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 162 –84; William Lamont, “The Religious Origins of the English Civil War,” in Gordon J. Schochet with Patricia E. Tatspaugh and Carol Brobeck, eds., Religion, Resistance, and Civil War: Proceedings of the Folger Institute Center for the History of British Political Thought (Washington, DC: Folger Institute, 1993), 3 –10; Christopher Hill, “Archbishop Laud and the English Revolution,” in Schochet, Tatspaugh, and Brobeck, eds., Religion, Resistance, and Civil War, 135; Kevin Sharpe, The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 284 –92; Nicholas Tyacke, AntiCalvinism: The Rise of English Arminianism, 1590–1640 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 47. Kirby, “Radicals of St. Stephen’s,” 106; Edwin Atwater, A History of the Colony of New Haven (New York, 1881), 29 –35; John Bruce, ed., Calendar of State Papers Domestic: Charles I, 1627–1628 (London, 1858), 77. 48. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 262 –65; Valerie Pearl, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution: Government and National Politics, 1626–1643 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), 162; Sharpe, Personal Rule of Charles I, 310–12; Tai Liu, Puritan London: A Study of Religion and Society in the City Parishes (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1986), 112; Dorothy Ann Williams, “London Puritanism: The Parish of St. Stephen Coleman Street,” Church Quarterly Review 160 (1961): 474; Atwater, History of the Colony of New Haven, 34; Isabel M. Calder, “A Seventeenth Century Attempt to Purify the Anglican Church,” American Historical Review 53, no.4 (1948): 760–75; Pauline Gregg, Free-Born John: A Biography of John Lilburne (London: Harrap, 1961), 47. 49. I rely here on Michael Winship’s insightful work on the puritan desire for parity between church and state governmental forms, an ideology he sees flourishing among “Presbyterians” as early as the 1580s. See his “Freeborn (Puritan) Englishmen and Slavish Subjection,” 1051–74, and “Godly Republicanism and the Origins of the Massachusetts Polity,” William and Mary

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Quarterly 63, no. 3 (2006): 427–62. For an example of late sixteenth-century puritan thought on church government, see William Fulke, A Brief and Plain Declaration Concerning the Desires of All Those Faithful Ministers that . . . Seek for the Discipline and Reformation of the Church of England (London, 1584). 50. For the ancient constitution’s place in early Stuart political thought and political debate, see Janelle Greenberg, The Radical Face of the Ancient Constitution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 116 –81. For classical republican influence, see Quentin Skinner, “Classical Liberty and the Coming of the English Civil War,” in van Gelderen and Skinner, eds., Republicanism, 2:9 –28; Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics: Renaissance Virtues (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 2:308 – 43. For civic humanism’s impact, see J. G. A. Pocock, “Propriety, Liberty and Valor: Ideology, Rhetoric and Speech in the 1628 Debates in the House of Commons,” in D. N. DeLuna, Perry Anderson, and Glenn Burgess, eds., The Political Imagination in History: Essays concerning J. G. A. Pocock (Dexter, MI: Owlworks, 2006), 231–60. 51. Ann Hughes, The Causes of the English Civil War (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991), 91; Malcolm Smuts, Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), 273. See J. P. Sommerville, Royalists and Patriots: Politics and Ideology in England, 1603–1640 (London: Longman, 1986), and Glenn Burgess, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution: An Introduction to English Political Thought (Hong Kong: Macmillan, 1991), 109 –38, 179 –89, 201–3, for the maturation of ideological conflict in early Stuart politics and religion. 52. Robert C. Johnson, Mary Frear Keeler, Maija Jansoon Cole, and William B. Bidwell, Commons Debates: 1628, 4 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977–78), 2:57, 92, 130, 363, 371. 53. Kelsey, “Robert Rich, Second Earl of Warwick,” DNB (2008); Johnson et al., eds., Commons Debates: 1628, 2:287. The phrase “specter of the commonality” is David Rollison’s. For an illuminating discussion of impressments and the Petition of Right debates, see Pocock, “Property, Liberty, and Valour,” in DeLuna, Anderson, and Burgess, eds., Political Imagination in History, 252 –56, where the quotations here may be found. Pocock argues that the petition’s clause against the use of martial law to prosecute soldiers and sailors for crimes in England arose from Parliament’s desire to place the country’s militia under the power of the common law and thus outside an unrestrained exercise of the royal prerogative. For more on impressment at this time, see Sharpe, Personal Rule of Charles I, 23 –26. 54. John Rushworth, ed., Historical Collections of Private Passages of State, 8 vols. (London, 1721), 1:302 –58; Thomas Cogswell, “The People’s Love: The Duke of Buckingham and Popularity,” in Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust, and Peter Lake, eds., Politics, Religion, and Popularity: Early Stuart Essays in Honor of Conrad Russell (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 211–34. The duke had pilfered £10,000 from Abbot and the East India Company, taking for his own a tenth of their proceeds from a 1622 pirating raid in the Straits of Hormuz. 55. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 224 –31; Pearl, Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution in London, 77–78. 56. For a graphic description of the disastrous Îsle de Re expedition, see Thomas Coggeswell, “John Felton, Popular Political Culture, and the Assassination of the Duke of Buckhingham,” Historical Journal 49, no. 2 (2006): 357–85. For the billet, see Robert Chambers, ed., The Book of Days: A Miscellany of Popular Antiquities, 2 vols. (London, 1832), 1:204; Kirby, “Radicals of St. Stephen’s,” 107. For the politics surrounding Lambe’s violent death, see Alastair Bellany, “The Murder of John Lambe: Crowd Violence, Court Scandal and Popular Politics in Early Seventeenth-Century England,” Past and Present 200 (2008): 37–76. As John Walter notes in his penetrating article on popular political unrest in 1607 Lincolnshire (see n58 in this chapter), seditious libels of the early Stuart period can be linked to Edward Thompson’s study of “crimes) of anonymity” Working on the violent rhetoric of written warnings to the early eighteenth century

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gentry, Thompson writes that “their intent is serious, but it may not be taken too literally.” Such seditious threats were tactical, meant to play on gentry fears of traditional popular violence as a means to redress grievances. See E. P. Thompson, “The Crime of Anonymity,” in E. P. Thompson et al., Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth Century England (London: Pantheon , 1976), 279. In the case of Dr. Lambe, however, we have something different. First, the violent note posted on Coleman Street responded to issues of national political import, not localized, class-specific grievances. Second, the note promised violence against the king’s favorite in the name of the commonality and its reformation work. By the 1620s, the seditious political traditions of the commonality had integrated into the arena of high politics, working themselves out on City streets during a protracted constitutional crisis. 57. For an account of the actual assassination, see James Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution (London: Verso, 2000), 167–70. For the immediate political context of the assassination covering the high politics of the Petition of Right controversy and the mutinies and riots of soldiers and sailors, see Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger, 170, and Coggeswell, “John Felton, Popular Political Culture, and the Assassination of the Duke of Buckingham,” 362 –64. For the riots at Portsmouth, their suppression, and Felton’s interrogation, also see John Bruce, ed., Calendar of State Papers Domestic, Charles I: 1628–1629 (London, 1859), 267–71. For a broader view of puritan political perceptions of tyranny before the English Revolution, see Nicholas Tyacke, “The Puritan Paradigm of English Politics, 1558 –1642,” Historical Journal 53, no. 3, (2010): 527–50. 58. Coggeswell, “John Felton, Popular Political Culture, and the Assassination of the Duke of Buckingham,” 357–85. For more on the relationship between scripture and political language in the decades preceding the English Revolution, see Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1993), 47–87. For a collection of primary material relating to Felton and Buckingham, see Frederick William Fairholt, Poems and Songs Relating to George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, and His Assassination by John Felton (London: Percy Society, 1850), quotes on 61, 64. For historians’ interpretations concerning popular political culture in early seventeenth-century England, see John Walter, “The English People and the English Revolution Revisited,” History Workshop Journal 61, no. 1 (2006): 171–82. 59. As a privy councillor, Laud provided the prerogative Courts of High Commission and Star Chamber with full authority to crack down on puritan preaching by prohibiting all clerical disputation concerning predestination. See James F. Larkin and Paul L. Hughes, eds., Stuart Royal Proclamations: Royal Proclamations of King Charles I, 1625–1646 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 2:90–93, 220–22. Kevin Sharpe finds fault with arguments that the Stuarts used High Commission to disproportionately target puritans. See his Personal Rule, 374 –83. Julian Davies stresses much the same in The Caroline Captivity of the Church: Charles I and the Remoulding of Anglicanism, 1625–1641 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), esp. 87–125. Here I side with David Como’s argument about the “unbalanced” targeting of Calvinists at the hands of Stuart prerogative courts; see David R. Como, “Predestination and Political Conflict in Laud’s London,” Historical Journal 46, no. 2 (2003): 263 –94. 60. John Bastwick, The Letany of John Bastwick . . . that the Bishops are Neither Christs, nor the Apostles Successors, but Enemies of Christ and his Kingdom, and of the King’s Most Excellent Majesty’s Prerogative Royal (Leiden, 1637); John Lilburne, England’s Weeping Spectacle (London, 1648), 2; Henry Burton, A Narration of the Life of Henry Burton (London, 1643), 5, 12 –14; A New Discovery of the Prelates Tyranny in their Late Prosecutions of Mr William Prynne, an Eminent Lawyer; Dr. John Bastwick, a Learned Physician; and Mr. Henry Burton, a Reverent Divine (London, 1641), 33 –60; Gregg, Free-Born John, 49 –51; David Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre–Civil-War England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 70. Authorities also listed Rice Boye, an antinomian conventicler who lived

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in Coleman Street Ward, in the bill of charges read against Prynne, accusing him of distributing Prynne’s seditious books. 61. For Pennington’s letter, see S. P. Dom. 16/363/120, quoted in Pearl, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution, 178. Richard Cust, “Charles I, the Privy Council and the Parliament of 1628,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, ser. 6, 2 (1992): 25 –50; Como, “Predestination and Political Conflict in Laud’s London,” 263 –94; Kirby, “Radicals of St. Stephen’s,” 107; Atwater, History of the Colony of New Haven, 29 –35; Dorothy A. Williams, “London Puritanism: The Parish of St. Stephen Coleman Street,” Church Quarterly Review 160 (1961): 474 –79; Calder, New Haven Colony, 35. 62. Emmanuel’s master, John Preston, oversaw the education of many well-known puritan divines; these included John Cotton, Thomas Shepard, Thomas Hooker, Jeremiah Burroughs, John Harvard, Henry Dunster, John Bastwick, and William Dell. 63. Williams, “London Puritanism,” 480; Kirby, “Radicals of St. Stephen’s,” 108, 111; Liu, London Puritanism, 110–15, 185, 194; J. C. Spalding, “John Goodwin,” in Richard Greaves and Robert Zaller, eds., Biographical Dictionary of British Radicals in the Seventeenth Century, 3 vols. (Brighton, UK: Harvester, 1982 –84), 2:16 –17. 64. For the attack on Ethrington, see Stephen Denison, The White Wolf, or a Sermon Preached at Paul’s Cross (London, 1627); Henry Burton, The Law and Gospel Reconciled (London, 1631); Peter Lake, The Box Maker’s Revenge: Orthodoxy, Heterodoxy, and the Politics of the Parish in Early Stuart London (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001). Lake’s entire book revolves around the Denison-Ethrington dispute, but see 86 –120 for the tightest focus on the issues at stake in the immediate context of the controversy. David Como has expanded Lake’s earlier work on the infighting among the London godly in the Caroline era. Between 1629 and 1631, High Commission also condemned the antinomians Robert Town, John Traske, and Samuel Prettie through intelligence provided by godly clergy and laity. See Como, Blown by the Spirit, 85 –96. 65. Eaton’s tract was published later as The Honeycomb of Free Justification by Christ Alone (London, 1642); S. R. Gardiner, Reports of Cases in the Courts of Star Chamber and High Commission (London: Camden Society, 1886), 278 –86, 292 –95, 300–302, 307–10, 315; Como, Blown by the Spirit, 99; Burrage, Early English Dissenters, 1:321–24; Murray Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 34 – 45; Philip Gura, A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England, 1620–1660 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1984), 102. 66. G. M., Essays and Characters of a Prison and Prisoners (London, 1638), 2 – 4. The author identifies himself as Geffray Mynshul, a student at Gray’s Inn, at the end of the epistle dedicatory. 67. For more contemporary descriptions of the horrid conditions within London’s prisons, see To the Worshipful Our Good Benefactor in all Lamentable Manner, Most Humbly Beseecheth Your Good Worship, We the Miserable Multitude of Very Poor Distressed Prisoners, in the Hole of Woodstreet Counter, in Number Fifty Poor Men, or Thereabouts, Lying Upon the Bare Boards, Still Languishing in Great Need (London, 1595); William Fennor, The Counter’s Commonwealth (London, 1616); Thomas Dekker, Jests to Make you Merry with the Conjuring Up of Cock Watt, (the Walking Spirit of Newgate) to Tell Tales. Unto Which is Added, the Misery of a Prison, and a Prisoner. And a Paradox in Praise of Sergeants. Written by T.D. and George Wilkins (London, 1607); The Miseries of a Jail: or A True Description of a Prison . . . with Many Special Characters of Sergeants, Key-Turners, Keepers, Beadles, and other Officers Abusing their Places, Themselves, and Other Men. Pleasant, and not Unprofitable (London, 1619). Also see Ned Ward’s graphic description of the Poultry Compter in The London Spy (London, 1703), excerpted in Walter Thornbury, Old and New London, 6 vols (London, 1878), 423 –24. 68. Como, Blown by the Spirit, 139; “Trask in the Star-Chamber, 1619,” Transactions of the

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Baptist Historical Society 5 (1916 –17): 8 –14; B. R. White, “Samuel Eaton, Particular Baptist Pioneer,” Baptist Quarterly 24 (1971): 10–21; William Douglas Hamilton, ed., Calendar of State Papers Domestic, vol. 14, 1639 (London, 1873), 466 –67; Returne Hebdon, A Guide to the Godly, or, The Daily Meditations of Returne Hebdon Gentleman . . . Left to Mrs. Traske, Who Not Long Since . . . Died in the Gatehouse (London, 1646), 1. See 138 –75 in Blown by the Spirit for Como’s chapter on Traske. Samuel How, who preached alongside Traske in Henry Jacob’s old Southwark church, might have drawn some of his antinomian social gospel from the teachings of Traske, who wrote, “The magistrate may hence learn, to judge impartially, to execute judgment without respect of persons, to deal uprightly between the rich and poor, the bond and free. Hereby he shall draw near to God and be most like him: he is no respecter of persons. He not only offereth, but bestoweth salvation on all sorts indifferently.” See Traske’s A Pearl for a Prince, or a Princely Pearl (London, 1615), 4. 69. The most influential book guiding studies of antinomianism remains Geoffrey Nuttal’s The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946, rpt. 1992). Philip Gura recasts antinomianism as “radical spiritism” to better convey both the affinity and the dissonance of antinomian spirituality with wider currents of puritan thought. See Gura’s A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England, 1620–1660 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1984), 49 –52. I borrow here from Gura’s useful terminology, employing the terms radical spiritism and spiritists interchangeably with antinomianism and antinomians. For overviews of antinomianism, see Christopher Hill, “Antinomianism in 17th Century England,” in The Collected Essays of Christopher Hill: Religion and Politics in 17th Century England, 2 vols. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), 1:162 –84; Theodore Dwight Bozeman, The Precisianist Strain: Disciplinary Religion and Antinomian Backlash in Puritanism to 1638 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), pt. 3; Como, Blown by the Spirit, 33 –72. For the construction of puritan orthodoxy, see Stephen Foster, “New England and the Challenge of Heresy, 1630–1660: The Puritan Crisis in Transatlantic Perspective,” William and Mary Quarterly 38, no. 4 (1981): 624 –60; Janice Knight, Orthodoxies in Massachusetts: Rereading American Puritanism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); Peter Lake and David Como, “‘Orthodoxy’ and Its Discontents: Dispute Settlement and the Production of Consensus in the London (Puritan) ‘Underground,’” Journal of British Studies 39, no. 1 (2000): 34 –70. 70. For more on Eaton and antinomian theology, see Como, Blown by the Spirit, 176 –218; Eaton quotations may be found in John Eaton, Discovery of the Most Dangerous Dead Faith (London, 1642), 115 –16, and Honeycomb of Free Justification by Christ Alone, 91, 124 –125, 422. T. D. Bozeman stresses that the antinomian challenge that Eaton precipitated originated as a response to the failure of Elizabethan Presbyterians to complete the English Church’s Protestant reformation. See Bozeman’s “The Glory of the ‘Third Time’: John Eaton as Contra-Puritan,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 47, no. 4 (1996): 638 –54. Bozeman argues in Precisianist Strain that antinomians’ “overall aim was, not to make limited adjustments, but to remake the (puritan) faith” (209). I follow Bozeman here, to argue that antinomians were struggling to control the direction of the puritan religious and social reform movement. Hill, “Antinomianism in 17th Century England,” in Collected Essays of Christopher Hill, 1:163—165, quote on 163. 71. Kirby, “Radicals of St. Stephen’s,” 109; Pearl, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution, 324; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 323 –24; How, Sufficiency of the Spirits Teaching, 6. 72. How, Sufficiency of the Spirits Teaching, A2. 73. Ibid., 1, 3, 4. 74. Ibid., B2, 7; Hebdon, Guide to the Godly, 18. If he had not read Hebdon’s manuscript, which most probably made the circuit of conventicles in the London underground via Dorothy Traske, How certainly would have been moved by Hebdon’s story since he shared the Southwark separatist pulpit with Hebdon’s onetime hero John Traske.

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75. How, Sufficiency of the Spirits Teaching, 28, 29, 37; Rice Boye, The Importunate Beggar, or Things Necessary, or Necessity, without Denial (Amsterdam, 1635), 38. Boye’s tract was most likely printed by John Canne in Amsterdam. 76. How, Sufficiency of the Spirits Teaching, 29; The Cobbler Vindicated, broadsheet (London, 1640). The anonymous author, who presented a litany of How’s “doctrines,” claims to have transcribed “the very same words he there delivered” at the Nag’s Head.

chapter t wo 1. John Mason’s original account of the events at Ft. Mystic was transcribed a century later by Thomas Prince. See John Mason, A Brief History of the Pequot War: Especially of the Memorable Taking of their Fort at Mistick in Connecticut . . . with an introduction . . . by Mr. Thomas Prince (Boston: Kneeland and T. Green, 1736), 4, 7–10, 22. For Robert Seely, see Ralph M. Seely, “The English Life of Robert Seely,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register 116 (1962): 159 –66. Davenport’s followers originally established the colony of New Haven, which united with Connecticut to form a single colony in 1664. 2. Alison Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999, 2001), 4; Virginia DeJohn Anderson, New England’s Generation: The Great Migration and the Formation of Society and Culture in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 15 –16; Henry A. Gemery, “Emigration from the British Isles to the New World, 1630–1700: Inferences from Colonial Populations,” Research in Economic History 5 (1980): 180–212. For a general treatment of early modern migration in the Atlantic, see William O’Reilly, “Movements of People in the Atlantic World, 1450–1850,” in Nicholas Canny and Philip Morgan, eds., The Oxford History of the Atlantic World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 3. This is not to suggest that a monolithic puritan culture engulfed seventeenth-century New England. Although puritan worldviews dominated its most powerful religious, legal, social, and political institutions, studies of seventeenth-century New England have increasingly emphasized the strong current of dissent from godly hegemony that arose as a function of the surprising degree of cultural diversity among the first generations of migrants. For examples, see Timothy L. Wood, Agents of Wrath, Sowers of Discord: Authority and Dissent in Puritan Massachusetts, 1630–1655 (New York: Routledge, 2005); Joseph Conforti, Saints and Strangers: New England in British North America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Charlotte Carrington, “Dissent and Identity in Seventeenth-Century New England,” PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2011). 4. Reconciliation often failed because instead of compromise, the Magisterial Reformation proponents who dominated New England’s clergy insisted on reuniting with their errant charges on grounds they themselves chose. For more on the stress puritan authorities placed on reconciliation, see Wood, Agents of Wrath, Sowers of Discord, chaps. 4 –5. 5. As Mark A. Peterson has demonstrated, the increasingly comfortable fit between puritan worldviews and the pursuit of maximized profits through trade and commerce would mature in the third quarter of the seventeenth century, even though New England had developed strong commercial links with the Chesapeake and West Indies as early as the mid-1640s. See Peterson’s The Price of Redemption: The Spiritual Economy of New England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). Stephen Innes and Bernard Bailyn have argued along similar lines while stressing how capitalism in early New England was modified by the puritans’ emphasis on the communal good and their disdain for self-aggrandizing and self-interested behavior. See Innes’s Creating the Commonwealth: The Economic Culture of Puritan New England (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995) and Bailyn’s New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955).

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6. The puritan stress on practical Christian “equity” as the bond that would unite the godly commonwealth in the spirit of reformation has been stressed by David D. Hall in his A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in Puritan New England (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), chap. 4. Historians have hotly disputed the motivations behind the “Great Migration” to New England. In a controversial article, Virginia Anderson sought to elevate religion, narrowly defined, above other considerations for migration. See her “Migrants and Motives: Religion and the Settlement of New England, 1630–1640,” New England Quarterly 58, no. 3 (1985): 339 –83, as well as New England’s Generation: The Great Migration and the Formation of Society and Culture in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 12 – 46. Susan Hardman Moore makes a similar and more recent argument in Pilgrims: New World Settlers and the Call of Home (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). The personal craving for spiritual righteousness that moved the godly transferred seamlessly into the socially and politically oriented labors of reformation. Such a comprehensive understanding of the nature of reformation meant that the godly did not compartmentalize religion in relation to anything else in their lives, a fact that reveals the futility of separating “religious” from “social” and “economic” motives for migration, since everything that compelled saints to remove to America can be enfolded into the godly ends of the colonies they settled. 7. For a monograph on religion in Virginia’s first decades, one of the few devoted to the subject, see Edward L. Bond, Damned Souls in a Tobacco Colony: Religion in Seventeenth-Century Virginia (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2000); April Lee Hatfield, Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), 105; Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race: The Origin of Racial Oppression in AngloAmerica, 2 vols. (New York: Verso, 1997), 2:58 –60, 62, 78, 104, 121, 166 –67, 174, 183, 209; CSPC 1574–1660, 114 –17; John C. Appleby, “An Association for the West Indies? English Plans for a West India Company, 1621–29,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 15, no. 3 (1987): 213 – 41. 8. CSPD 1574–1660, 405; See Warwick and Abbot’s holdings on “A Map or Description of Sommer Islands Sometimes called Bermudas, “ (1622), in Vernon A. Ives, ed., The Rich Papers: Letters from Bermuda, 1615–1646 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), appendix; see excerpts from the journal of the Spanish prisoner Joan de Rivera y Saabedra in L. D. Gurrin, “Shipwrecked Spaniards, 1639: Grievances against Bermudians,” Bermuda Historical Quarterly 18, no. 1 (1961): 13 –28; Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 155; Valerie Pearl, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution: Government and National Politics, 1626–1643 (London: Oxford University Press), 324; Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World, 132 –35. 9. Daniel Elfrith, “To the Right Hon. Co. of Advent. of the City of Westminster for the Island of Providence,” Newberry Library, Ayers MS 272; Captain Bell to Sir Nathaniel Rich, March 1629, in Ives, ed., Rich Papers; A. P. Newton, Colonizing Activities of the English Puritans: The Last Phase of the Elizabethan Struggle with Spain (1914; rpt. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1966), 319 –21; Kris E. Lane, Pillaging the Empire: Piracy in the Americas, 1500–1750 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), 67–72. For more on the piratical concern so integral to profit making through pillage and slave trading on Bermuda, see Virginia Bernhard, “Beyond the Chesapeake: The Contrasting Status of Blacks in Bermuda, 1616 –1663,” Journal of Southern History 54, no. 4 (1988): 551, 552, 557. Nathaniel Rich, a prominent member of the Bermuda and Providence Island Companies, was a brother-in-law of Owen Roe, the godly Coleman Street merchant and colonial investor. 10. Newton, Colonizing Activities of the English Puritans, 58, 70–71, 95, 127; Karen O. Kupperman, Providence Island, 1630–1641: The Other Puritan Colony (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 28. 11. Newton, Colonizing Activities of the English Puritans, 117, 163, 253, 257; Kupperman,

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Providence Island, 1630–1641, 167–294; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 159; V. T. Harlow, The Voyages of Captain William Jackson, vol. 13 (London: Camden Miscellany, 1913). 12. “Commission from the Providence Island Company to Governor Nathaniel Butler (April 23, 1638),” in J. Franklin Jameson, ed., Privateering and Privacy in the Colonial Period: Illustrative Documents (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1923, 1970), 1–2; Newton, Colonizing Activities of the English Puritans, 253 –54, 258 –59; W. Frank Craven, “The Earl of Warwick, a Speculator in Piracy,” Hispanic American Historical Review 10, no. 4 (1930): 469 –71. 13. Kupperman, Providence Island, 1630–1641, 165, 172. I have relied here on Kupperman’s work as well as Anthony S. Parent Jr.’s impressively theorized Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660–1740 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). 14. Noel Sainsbury, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, 1574–1660 (London, 1860), 296; Kupperman, Providence Island, 1630–1641, 165, 174, 175, 177; Newton, Colonizing Activities of the English Puritans, 110, 253 –54, 258 –61; Lane, Pillaging the Empire, chap. 4; Alison F. Games, “‘The Sanctuarye of Our Rebell Negroes’: The Atlantic Context of Local Resistance on Providence Island, 1630– 41,” Slavery & Abolition 19, no. 3 (1998): 1–21. 15. Frances Rose-Troup, The Massachusetts Bay Company and Its Predecessors (New York: Grafton, 1930). For the best account of the plans made by the future leaders of the Bay Colony while still in Old England, see Francis Bremer, John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 147–72. 16. Francis Bremer, Congregational Communion: Clerical Friendship in the Anglo-American Puritan Community, 1610–1692 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1994), 102; D. A. Kirby, “The Radicals of St. Stephen’s, Coleman Street,” Guildhall Miscellany 3, no. 2 (1970): 101, 104, 106; Isabel Macbeath Calder, The New Haven Colony (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1934), 34, and “A Seventeenth Century Attempt to Purify the Anglican Church,” American Historical Review 53, no.4 (1948): 763; Edwin Atwater, A History of the Colony of New Haven (New York, 1881), 30. For a copy of the Bay Colony Charter listing names of original members, see Trinity College Dublin Mss 736 fols. 119 –56, names on fols. 125 –26. James Savage, ed., The History of New England from 1630–1649 by John Winthrop, Esq., 2 vols. (Boston: Phelps and Farnham, 1825), 1:360, cited hereafter as Winthrop’s Journal; Robert E. Moody, ed., The Saltonstall Papers, 2 vols. (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1972 –74), 1:6 –8, cited hereafter as Saltonstall Papers; James Ernst, Roger Williams: New England Firebrand (New York: AMS, 1932, 1969), 55. For Williams’s own account of his journey to Sempringham with Hooker and Cotton, see his Bloody Tenent Yet More Bloody (London, 1652), 12. 17. John Winthrop Jr. to John Winthrop Sr. (1629?), in Winthrop’s Journal, 1:354, 359; Francis J. Bremer, “The Heritage of John Winthrop: Religion along the Stour Valley, 1548 –1630,” New England Quarterly 70, no. 4 (1997): 520, 525 –35. 18. John Winthrop, “Reasons to be Considered for Justifying the Undertakers of the Intended Plantation in New England, and for Encouraging such Whose Hearts God Shall Move to Join with Them in It” (1629), in Peter Mancall, ed., Envisioning America: English Plans for the Colonization of America, 1580–1640 (New York: Bedford Books, 1995), 134 –38; Thomas More, Utopia (orig. 1516; New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), 14; Foster, Long Argument, 111; John Walter, “Grain Riots and Popular Attitudes to the Law: Maldon and the Crisis of 1629,” in J. Brewer and J. Styles, eds., An Ungovernable People: The English and Their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1980), 47–84. For more on Winthrop’s practical Christianity, see Bremer, John Winthrop, 173 –84. 19. Winthrop, “Reasons to be Considered,” 134 –38. 20. John Winthrop to Henry Winthrop, January 30, 1629, in Winthrop’s Journal, 1:354 –55. 21. John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity,” in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3rd ser., vol. 7 (1838), 34 –36, 39, 40, 46. For more on the concept of godly equity in Old and New England contexts, see Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth Century

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English Political Instability in European Context (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 247–68, and Hall’s Reforming People, chap. 4. Both Scott and Hall have produced exemplary work on the godly that has restored a much needed focus on the emphasis the saints gave to the concept of equity in their social relationships. 22. Winthrop, “Model of Christian Charity,” 46 – 47. I have concentrated on Winthrop’s covenant due to its fame and its overarching claims for the puritan colonists of the Great Migration. For more on the character and content of covenant making in seventeenth-century New England, see David A. Weir, Early New England: A Covenanted Society (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005). 23. James E. McWilliams, Building the Bay Colony: Local Economy and Culture in Early Massachusetts (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007): Margaret Ellen Newell, From Dependency to Independence: Economic Revolution in Colonial New England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998); Saltonstall Papers, 1:6n8; Darrett B. Rutman, Winthrop’s Boston: A Portrait of a Puritan Town, 1630–1649 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965), 28 – 40, 179; Larzer Ziff, Puritanism in America (New York: Viking, 1973); Bernard Bailyn, The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1955, 1964), 38 – 40. 24. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 420; Alexander Young, ed., Chronicles of the First Planters of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, 1626–1636 (Boston, 1846), 211; Philip Gura, A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England, 1620–1660 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1984), 34 – 43; Rutman, Winthrop’s Boston, 99 –100; Winthrop’s Journal, 1:164; Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World, chap. 6. 25. Winthrop’s Journal, 1:53, 162 –63; Edwin S. Gaustad, Roger Williams (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 5 –8; James Ernst, Roger Williams: New England Firebrand (New York: AMS, 1932, 1969), 61–96, and Roger Williams: The Church and the State (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967), 86 –114; Ziff, Puritanism in America, 102; Gura, Glimpse of Sion’s Glory, 40; William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647, ed. Samuel Elliot Morrison (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953), 256 –58. 26. Winthrop’s Journal, 1:122; Selma Williams, Kings, Commoners, and Colonists: Puritan Politics in Old and New England (New York: Athenaeum, 1974), 112 –16; Corinne Weston and Janelle Greenberg, Subjects and Sovereigns: The Grand Controversy of Legal Sovereignty in Stuart England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 128 –30; Janelle Greenberg, The Radical Face of the Ancient Constitution: St. Edward’s “Laws” in Early Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 117; John Garrett, Roger Williams: Witness beyond Christendom, 1603–1683 (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1970), 72 –80, 193 –99. Williams regarded Coke as a “father,” and indeed while serving as chief justice on the King’s Bench, the eminent jurist employed Williams as a court recorder, and later sponsored his entrance into Pembroke College, Cambridge. For more on Williams and the law, see Christopher Felker, “Roger Williams’ Use of Legal Discourse: Testing Authority in Early New England,” New England Quarterly 63, no. 4 (1990): 624 – 48; Nan Goodman, “Banishment, Jurisdiction, and Identity in SeventeenthCentury New England: The Case of Roger Williams,” Early American Studies 7, no. 1 (2009): 109 –39. 27. Winthrop’s Journal 1:122, 151; Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976), 139 – 42; Hugh Spurgin, Roger Williams and Puritan Radicalism in the English Separatist Tradition (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1989), 26 –28; Perry Miller, Roger Williams: His Contribution to the American Tradition (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953), 93; Gura, Sion’s Glory, 39 – 43; Andrew Delbanco, The Puritan Ordeal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989) , 100–101. 28. Roger Williams, Mr. Cotton’s Letter Lately Printed, Examined, and Answered (Providence: Narragansett Club, 1866), 324 –25; Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America (London, 1643), 53, and The Bloody Tenet of Persecution (London, 1644), in A. S. P. Woodhouse,

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ed., Puritanism and Liberty: Being the Army Debates (1647–1649) from the Clarke Manuscripts with Supplementary Documents (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1974), 283 –84; Ken MacMillan, “Benign and Benevolent Conquest? The Ideology of Elizabethan Atlantic Expansion Revisited,” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 9, no. 1 (2011): 36; Ernst Cassirer, The Platonic Renaissance in England (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1953), 12 –13, 34 –35, quoted in Jonathan Scott, Commonwealth Principles: Republican Writing of the English Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 43 – 44. Here Williams’s views ironically echoed Catholic teaching respecting the land rights of Native Americans on the Spanish Main. For more on how the Spanish dealt with the dilemma of colonial occupation in regard to Indian land rights, see J. H. Elliot, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 29 –57; Anthony Pagden, “Dispossessing the Barbarian: The Language of Spanish Thomism and the Debate over the Property Rights of the American Indians,’’ in Anthony Pagden, ed., The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 79 –98; James Muldoon, The Americas in the Spanish World Order: The Justification for Conquest in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994). Williams’s thinking on Indians resonated most with closely with that of Thomas More and Bartolomé de las Casas, two leading figures of Catholic humanism, which was not exactly the same animal as its English Protestant counterpart, as exemplified by Edmund Spenser’s late Elizabethan views on Ireland and those of entertained by the organizers of the Bay Colony venture a generation later. 29. Winthrop, “Reasons to be Considered,” 134 –38; Ken MacMillan, Sovereignty and Possession in the English New World: The Legal Foundations of Empire, 1576–1640 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 121– 48; Jenny Hale Pulsipher, “Subjects Unto the Same King”: English, Indians, and the Contest for Authority in Colonial New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 2; Christopher Tomlins, Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and the Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 148 –52, esp. n59; David Grayson Allen, “Vacuum Domicilium: The Social and Cultural Landscape of Seventeenth-Century New England,” in Jonathan L. Fairbanks and Robert F. Trent, eds., New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1982), 1; Jane Ohlmeyer, “Early Modern Ireland and English Imperialism,” in Kevin Kenny, ed., Ireland and the British Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 52 –55; Ciaran Brady, “Spenser’s Irish Crisis: Humanism and Experience in the 1590s,” Past & Present, no. 111 (1986): 17– 49; John Donne, “A Sermon Preached to the Honorable Company of the Virginian Plantation,” in The Sermons of John Donne, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959), 4:272. 30. Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500–1643 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982, 1984), 30–37; Jennings, Invasion of America, 62 –73. Bradford, A Relation or Journal of the Beginning and Proceedings of the English Plantation Settled at Plymouth in New England (London, 1622), 6. For more on settler perceptions of Native Americans and the racial constructions they ultimately generated, see Richard A. Bailey, Race and Redemption in Puritan New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Karen Kupperman, Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), and Settling with the Indians: The Meeting of English and Indian Cultures in America, 1580–1640 (Toronto: Rowan and Littlefield, 1980); Ronald Takaki, “The Tempest in the Wilderness: The Racialization of Savagery,” Journal of American History 79 (1992): 892 –912. For Indian perceptions of European settlers, see Daniel Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). The Irish Pale consisted of Dublin and the surrounding environs in the province of Leinster under English governance. 31. Jennings, Invasion of America, 24 –25; Salisbury, Manitou and Providence, 175 –76; Tom-

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lins, Freedom Bound, 23, 23n4; Thomas Morton, New English Canaan (London, 1637), in Peter Force, ed., Tracts and Other Papers Relating Principally to the Origin Settlement and Progress of the Colonies in North America from the Discovery of the Country to the Year 1776 (Washington, 1837), 2:23; Winthrop quoted in Takaki, “Tempest in the Wilderness,” 908, 911. 32. Winthrop’s Journal, 1:171, 175; Garrrett, Roger Williams, 17–18; Francis Bremer, John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 251; Lee Schweninger, John Winthrop (Boston: Twayne, 1990), 100–101; Donald Grinde and Bruce Johansen, Examplar of Liberty: Native America and the Evolution of Democracy (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), 76: John Palfrey, History of New England, 2 vols. (New York: AMS, 1966), 2:410–22. 33. The New England Antinomian Controversy has received a steady stream of scholarly attention. For notable examples, see Theodore Dwight Bozeman, The Precisianist Strain: Disciplinary Religion and Antinomian Backlash in Puritanism to 1638 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Michael Winship, Making Heretics: Militant Protestantism and Free Grace in Massachusetts, 1636–1641 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), and The Times and Trials of Anne Hutchinson (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005). Also see David D. Hall’s invaluable edited collection of primary sources concerning the affair: The Antinomian Controversy, 1636–1638: A Documentary History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1968, 1990). 34. For scholarship on the Pequot War, see Alfred Cave, The Pequot War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996); Andrew Lipman, “‘A Meanes to Knitt Them Togeather’: The Exchange of Body Parts in the Pequot War,” William and Mary Quarterly 65, no. 1 (2008): 3 –28; Andrea Robertson Cremer, “Possession: Indian Bodies, Cultural Control, and Colonialism in the Pequot War,” Early American Studies 6, no. 2 (2008): 295 –345. 35. Important exceptions in the literature where scholars have tried to integrate the history of the Pequot War and the Antinomian Controversy include David Thomson, “The Antinomian Crisis: Prelude to Puritan Missions ,” Early American Literature 38, no. 3 (2003): 401–35; Ann Kibbey, The Interpretation of Material Shapes in Puritanism: A Study of Rhetoric, Prejudice, and Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 92 –120. 36. John Winthrop, A Short Story of the Rise, Reign, and Ruin of the Antinomians, Familists, and Libertines (London, 1644), in Hall, ed., Antinomian Controversy, 263; Sargent Bush, “Revising What We Have Done Amiss,” William and Mary Quarterly 45, no. 4 (1988): 738; Perry Miller, The New England Mind in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1939, 1954, 1982), 303; David Como, “Blown by the Spirit”: Puritanism and the Emergence of the Antinomian Underground in Pre–Civil War England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 168 –69; “A Report of the Trial of Anne Hutchinson before the Church in Boston,” in Hall, ed., Antinomian Controversy, 380. 37. Rebecca J. Tannenbaum, The Healer’s Calling: Women and Medicine in Early New England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 84 –89; Emery Battis, Saints and Sectaries: Ann Hutchinson and the Antinomian Controversy in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962), 10–15; David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 42 –50. 38. Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop (New York: Longman, 1958, 1999), 138; David Lovejoy, Religious Enthusiasm in the New World: Heresy to Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 69 –70; David Hall, introduction to Hall, ed., Antinomian Controversy, 5 –6; Gura, Sion’s Glory, 241– 45; Everett Emerson, John Cotton (Boston: Twayne, 1990), 87; Stephen Foster, The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570–1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 628 –30; George Selement and Bruce Wolley, eds., Thomas Shepard’s Confessions (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1981), introduction. For the tension between the doctrine of preparation and the covenant of grace, see Perry Miller, New England Mind, 57–67; Battis, Saints

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and Sectaries, 129 –33; Delbanco, Puritan Ordeal, 118 – 48; Bozeman, Precisianist Strain, 107–11; Richard Godbeer, “Performing Patriarchy: Gendered Roles and Hierarchies in Early Modern England and Seventeenth-Century New England,” in Francis Bremer and Lynn A. Botelho, eds., The World of John Winthrop: Essays on England and New England, 1588–1649 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2005); William Stoever, “A Faire and Easy Way to Heaven”: Covenant Theology and Antinomianism in Early Massachusetts (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1978), 58 –81, 192 –200. For more on Shepard, see Michael McGiffert, ed., God’s Plot: Puritan Spirituality in Thomas Shepard’s Cambridge (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1972, 1994). 39. Battis, Saints and Sectaries, 258 –59; Gura, Sion’s Glory, 247; Lovejoy , Religious Enthusiasm, 91–92; J. H. Adamson and H. F. Folland, Sir Harry Vane: His Life and Times, 1613–1662 (Boston: Gambit, 1973), 69; B. S. Capp, “Willliam Aspinwall,” in Greaves and Zaller, eds., Biographical Dictionary, 1:25 –26; B. R. White, “Hanserd Knollys,” in Greaves and Zaller, eds., Biographical Dictionary,, 2:160; Sydney James with Theodore Dwight Bozeman, John Clarke and His Legacies: Religion and Law in Colonial Rhode Island 1638–1750 (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1999); Barbara Dailey, “Root and Branch: New England Religious Radicals and Their Trans-Atlantic Community, 1600–1660,” PhD diss., Boston University, 1984, 115 –18; Bailyn, New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century, 40; Louise Breen, Transgressing the Bounds: Subversive Enterprises among the Puritan Elite in Massachusetts, 1630–1692 (London: Oxford University Press, 2001), 19 –21; Timothy Hall, “Assurance, Community, and the Puritan Self in the Antinomian Controversy, 1636 –1638,” in Laura Lunger Knoppers, ed., Puritanism and Its Discontents (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003), 205 –7. For the origin of and clerical resistance to lay prophesying, see Geoffrey Nuttall, The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946, 1992), 76 –82. 40. Winthrop, “Model of Christian Charity,” 34 –36; Richard Archer, Fissures in the Rock: New England in the Seventeenth Century (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2001), 27–97; Schweninger, John Winthrop, 99; Stoever, “Faire and Easy Way,” 161–84; Bozeman, Precisianist Strain, 281–306. 41. Winthrop, Short Story, 209; Louise Breen, “Religious Radicalism in the Puritan Officer Corps: Heterodoxy, the Artillery Company, and Cultural Integration in Seventeenth-Century Boston,” New England Quarterly 68 (1995): 24; Lovejoy, Religious Enthusiasm, 72 –78; Gura, Sion’s Glory, 241–57; Rutman, Winthrop’s Boston, 169 –72; Hall, introduction to Antinomian Controversy, 8 –9; Winthrop’s Journal, 1:209, 212. 42. Hall, introduction to Antinomian Controversy, 6 –7; John Wheelwright, “Fast Day Sermon,” in Hall, ed., Antinomian Controversy, 165 –66; Battis, Saints and Sectaries, 155 –58. 43. Winthrop’s Journal, 1:104, 111, 112, 122; Cave, Pequot War, 69 –72; Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647, 268 –70; William Hubbard, The Present State of New England, Being a Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians in New England (London, 1677), 118; Jennings, Invasion of America, 188 –96 (see 194n22 for Captain John Mason’s statement that the Pequots did not kill Stone); Salisbury, Manitou and Providence, 211; Allyn Bailey Forbes, ed., The Winthrop Papers, 1631–1637, vol. 3 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1943), 285. The conflict over the Connecticut River Valley exemplifies Laura Benton’s thesis that the “distinctive legal geography” of colonial claims to sovereign jurisdiction initially focused on “riverine regions” rather than large blocks of territory. See Benton’s A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 103. 44. Robert E. Moody, ed., The Saltonstall Papers, 1607–1789, vol. 1 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1972), 14 –17; Bradford, Plymouth Plantation, 2:183 –86, 196 –98; Winthrop Papers, 3:195 –98; Newton, Colonizing Activities of the English Puritans, 177–78. 45. Winthrop’s Journal, 1:184; Nathaniel Shurtleff, ed., Records of the Governor and the Com-

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pany of the Massachusetts Bay, vol. 1, 1628–1641 (New York: AMS Press, 1968), 264; Jennings, Invasion of America, 204, 208 –21; Alden Vaughan, New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians, 1620–1675 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965, 1979), 126; Cave, Pequot War, 101, 122 –28; J. Hammond Trumball, ed., The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut Prior to the Union with New Haven Colony, May 1665 (Hartford, 1850), 4 –5; Lion Gardiner, “Lieft. Lion Gardner his relation of the Pequot Warres,” Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, 3rd ser., 3:148 – 49; John Underhill, News from America (London, 1638), 7–9; John Palfrey, History of New England, 2 vols. (New York: AMS, 1966), 1:460–61; Bremer, John Winthrop, 269 –70. 46. Winthrop’s Journal, 1:210–11, 214, 216; Palfrey, History of New England, 1:483; Battis, Saints and Sectaries, 148 –50; Gura, Sion’s Glory, 250; Winthrop, Short Story, 260–61; David Zaret, Origins of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 83 –90. 47. Winthrop’s Journal, 1:219 –20, 224, 402; Lovejoy, Religious Enthusiasm, 92; Schweninger, John Winthrop, 101; Delbanco, Puritan Ordeal, 200; Battis, Saints and Sectaries, 152. 48. Trumball, Public Records of Connecticut, 1:9, 10; Winthrop’s Journal, 1:218, 222; Winthrop, Short Story, 254. 49. Underhill, News from America, 41– 43; Stephen T. Katz, “The Pequot War Reconsidered,” in Alden Vaughan, ed., New England Encounters: Indians and Euroamericans, ca. 1600–1850 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999), 117–20. Underhill estimates that four hundred Pequots died, while Mason counts between six and seven hundred. The larger issue goes beyond discrepancies in casualty estimates: the point is that hardly any Indians survived the attack on Fort Mystic. Mason, History of the Pequot War, v, 3, 4, 10; Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building (New York: Schocken Books, 1980, 1990), 43; Jennings, Invasion of America, 222 –25; Cave, Pequot War, 148 –53. For “rooted out” and the “curse of Ham,” see Winthrop’s Journal, 2:20. Underhill is the only antinomian that I can verify as having participated in the expedition to Fort Mystic. For other early applications of the “curse of Ham” to Indians in the early years of English colonization, see Tomlins, Freedom Bound, 143 – 44n 36, and William Strachey, The History of Travail into Virginia Britannia: Expressing the Cosmography and Commodities of the Country, Together with the Manners and Customs of the People (London, 1609 –13), reprinted by R. H. Major, ed. (London, 1849), 47. 50. For English violence in colonial Ireland, see Nicholas Canny, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: A Pattern Established (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1976) 91, 123 –27, 130–32. For the same in relation to the puritan warfare against the Pequots, see Ronald Karr, “Why Should You Be So Furious? The Violence of the Pequot Wars,” Journal of American History 85, no. 3 (1998): 886 –87. For a colonial perspective that builds valuable bridges across the Atlantic by comparing the relations of Protestant colonists in Ireland and New England with Irish Catholics and Native Americans, see Jane Ohlmeyer, “Early Modern Ireland and English Imperialism,” in Kevin Kenny, ed., Ireland and the British Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 52 –55, esp. n103. 51. Roger Williams to John Winthrop ( June 21, 1637) in Winthrop Papers, 3:434; Roger Williams to John Winthrop ( July 5, 1637) in ibid., 3:450; Karr, “Why Should You Be So Furious,” 880. For conventional early modern thought regarding the treatment of civilians and captives in war, see William Gouge, The Churches Conquest over the Sword (1631), in God’s Three Arrows: Plague, Famine, Sword: In Three Treatises (London, 1636), particularly 216, 290, 295, 295, as quoted in Karr, “Why Should You Be So Furious.” 52. Richard Davenport to Hugh Peter ( July 17, 1637), in Winthrop Papers, 3:453; John Winthrop to William Bradford ( July 28 , 1637), in ibid., 456; Roger Williams to John Winthrop ( July 31, 1637) in ibid., 459; Winthrop’s Journal, 1:254; Roger Williams to John Winthrop (ca. August 12, 1637), in Correspondence of Roger Williams, 1:108 –10; Roger Williams to John Winthrop (ca. October 1638), in ibid., 192 –94; Jennings, Invasion of America, 113; Cave, Pequot War,

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159. Williams did not, as Francis Bremer incorrectly states, enslave a Pequot boy that Winthrop sent him. See Bremer, John Winthrop, 314. 53. Winthrop’s Journal, 1:234 – 41; Winship, Times and Trials of Anne Hutchinson, 94 –99. 54. Winthrop, Short Story, 250–60; Shurtleff, ed., Records of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1:207. 55. “The Examination of Mrs. Hutchinson at the Court at Newtown,” in Hall, ed., Antinomian Controversy, 338, 342, 343, 348. For Hutchinson’s affinity with Eatonite antinomianism, see Stoever, “Faire and Easy Way,” 138 – 47. 56. David D. Hall, The Faithful Shepherd: A History of the New England Ministry in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Divinity School, 1972, 2005), 76; Winthrop’s Journal, 1:227; “The Examination of Mrs. Ann Hutchinson at the Court of Newtown,” in Hall, ed., Antinomian Controversy, 358 –68; Winthrop, Short Story, 274, 301–3. For more on the patriarchal suppression of Hutchinson’s prophetic sedition, see the analysis in chaps. 3 –5 of Jane Kamensky’s Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 57. John Albo, ed., The Works of Thomas Shepard, 2 vols. (Boston, 1853), cxxvi; “Examination of Mrs. Ann Hutchinson,” 345 – 47. Shepard’s quotes regarding Vane are from Winship, Times and Trials of Anne Hutchinson, 90–91. 58. John Winthrop, “Liberty and the Weal Public Reconciled . . . concerning . . . the Late Court of Elections at Newtown,” in Thomas Hutchinson, ed., A Collection of Original Papers Relative to the History of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay (Boston, 1769), 63 –65. In sermons to the church at Newtown, Shepard employed the same populist strategy to defend the court’s actions. See Winship, Times and Trials of Anne Hutchinson, 90–91. 59. John Winthrop, “A Defense of an Order of Court Made in the Year 1637,” in Hutchinson, ed., Collection of Original Papers, 67–71. 60. Henry Vane, “A Brief Answer to a Certain Declaration,” in Hutchinson, ed., Collection of Original Papers, 73 –77; John Winthrop, “A Reply to an Answer Made to a Declaration,” in ibid., 86. 61. Vane, “Brief Answer to a Certain Declaration,” 74, 76. 62. Ibid., 75, 82. 63. CSPC 1547–1660, 296; Winthrop’s Journal, 1:274, 307; Shurtleff, ed., Records of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1:256; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 153, 165, 191. 64. Winthrop’s Journal, 1:331–33; 2:13. Winthrop noted smugly that Humfrey lost £160 worth of corn when his servants inadvertently burned down the barn storing the provisions he planned to transport to Providence. Winthrop also recorded that the noble lords of Providence lost £60,000.

chapter three 1. William Douglas Hamilton, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series: Charles I, 1641– 1643 (London, 1887), 215 –18, hereafter CSPD, 1641–1643; The Humble Petition of the Apprentices and those Whose Times of Apprenticeships Are Lately Expired in and About the City of London (London, 1641); John Lilburne, England’s Weeping Spectacle (London, 1648), 3; Peter Heylyn, Examen Historicum, or, A Discovery and Examination of the Mistakes, Falsities and Defects in Some Modern Histories (London, 1659), 131; David Cressy, England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution, 1640–1642 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 388 –92; Brian Manning, Aristocrats, Plebeians, and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (London: Pluto, 1996), 35 –36; Pauline Gregg, Free-Born John: A Biography of John Lilburne (London: Harrap, 1961), 89; Valerie Pearl, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution: Government and National Politics, 1626–1643 (London; Oxford University Press, 1961), 211–13.

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2. As the historians David Cressy, Brian Manning, and Lawrence Stone have shown, the first English civil war followed the outbreak of the Revolution in 1640. See Cressy, England on Edge: Crisis and Revolution, 1640–1642 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Manning, The English People and the English Revolution, 1640–1649 (London: Heinemann, 1976, 1991); Stone, The Causes of the English Revolution (New York: Routledge, 1972, 2002). For the opposite view, that the Revolution emerged from the upheavals of the first civil war, see Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth Century English Political Instability in European Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 3. John Morrill, “The Scottish National Covenant of 1638 in its British Context,” in The Nature of the English Revolution: Essays by John Morrill (New York: Longmans, 1993), 91–117; Mark Charles Fissell, The Bishops’ Wars: Charles I’s Campaigns against Scotland, 1638–1640 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Richard Cust, Charles I: A Political Life (New York: Pearson Longman, 2005), 226 –67; D. A. Kirby, “The Radicals of St. Stephen’s, Coleman Street,” in The Guildhall Miscellany (London, 1971), 105; Andrew Rush, “Sir Maurice Abbott, 1565 –1642,” in Lawrence Goldman, ed., Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; online ed. 2008), hereafter DNB Online (2008); Gregg, Free-Born John, 77–78. 4. Gregg, Free-Born John, 83 –84; Leo Solt, “Winstanley, Lilburne, and the Case of John Fielder,” Huntington Library Quarterly 45, no. 2 (1982): 128; A Cry for Justice (London, 1639); Letter to the Apprentices of London (London, 1639); Come Out of Her My People (London, 1639). 5. Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 306 –10; Leo Francis Stock, ed., Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments Respecting North America, 5 vols. (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1924), 1:87–90. 6. Esther S. Cope, “Compromise in Early Stuart Parliaments: The Case of the Short Parliament of 1640,” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 9, no. 2 (1977): 135 – 45; D. Alan Orr, “Sovereignty, Supremacy and the Origins of the English Civil War,” History 87, no. 288 (2002): 474 –90; Tai Liu, “John Goodwin,” in DNB Online (2008). 7. William Douglas Hamilton, ed., Calendar of State Papers Domestic: Charles I, 1640 (London, 1880), 88, 171, 190, hereafter CSPD 1640; Cressy, England on Edge, 117–18; quotations are from Report on the Manuscripts of Viscount De L’Isle, VC, Preserved at Pensonhurst Place, Historical Manuscripts Commission, vol. 77 (London, 1966), 267, hereafter HMC De L’Isle. 8. Hamilton, ed., CSPD 1640, 7, 151, 196, 197, 247, 250, 476, 477, 489 –97, 506; HMC De L’Isle, 270, 285, 301; Fissell, Bishops’ Wars, chap. 7; Cressy, England on Edge, 80, 91; Manning, Aristocrats, Plebeians, and Revolution, 1640–1660, 18 –21. For an insightful treatment of the relationship between popular politics and violence at this time, see John Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: The Colchester Plunderers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 9. The Cobbler’s Thread is Cut, or The Cobbler’s Monument, broadsheet (London, 1640); M. Saward, “Unconsecrated Burial Grounds,” Notes and Queries 7 (1859): 296; Stephen Wright, “Thomas Lambe, fl. 1629 –1661,” in DNB Online (2008); P. R. S. Baker, “Edward Barber, d. 1663,” in DNB Online (2008). 10. Cressy, England on Edge, 160–61; HMC De L’Isle, 339; The Manuscripts of the Earl of Cowper, K.G., Preserved at Melbourne Hall, Derbyshire, Historical Manuscripts Commission, 12th Report, 2 vols. (London, 1888), 1:262. For political satires on Bishops Duck and Wren, see The Decoy Duck (London, 1642) and The Wren’s Nest Defiled (London, 1641). 11. For explanations of how Scotland’s troubles in the late 1630s gave rise to England’s own and others’ throughout the three kingdoms, see Ian Gentles, The English Revolution and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, 1638–1652 (Harlow, Essex, UK: Pearson Longman, 2007); Allan Macinnes, The British Revolution, 1629–1660 (Houndmills, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); David Scott, Politics and War in the Three Stuart Kingdoms, 1637–1649 (Houndmills, Basingstoke,

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UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); James Scott Wheeler, The Irish and British Wars, 1637–1654: Triumph, Tragedy, and Failure (New York: Routledge, 2002); Austin Woolrych, Britain in Revolution, 1625–1660 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 12. The Humble Petition and Appeal of John Fielder of Kingston Miller (London, 1651), 18 –19; Christopher Hill, God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (New York: Dial, 1970), 78; Warwick, quoted in Antonia Fraser, Cromwell: The Lord Protector (New York: Grove, 1973), 64; Solt, “Winstanley, Lilburne, and the Case of John Fielder,” 128; Gregg, Free-Born John, 84. 13. For Pennington and petitioning, see Journals of the House of Commons, 1547–1659, 7 vols. (London, 1803), 2:125, 127, hereafter Commons Journals; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 323 –325, 337, Pearl, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution, 110–13, 116, 177; Samuel Rawson Gardiner, History of England from the Accession of James I to the Outbreak of the Civil War, 1603–1642, 10 vols. (London: Longmans, 1894 –96), 9:329 –30. For examples of political petitioning organized from below during the Revolutionary crisis of 1640– 42, see The Apprentices of London’s Petition presented to the Honourable Court of Parliament, Humbly Shewing unto them the Manifold Abuses of their Apprenticeship . . . presented with the names of above 30,000 (London, 1641); The Humble Petition of 15,000 Poor Laboring Men Known by the Name of Porters, and the Lowest Members of the City of London (London, 1641); To the Right Honourable the House of Lords Now Assembled in Parliament, The Humble Petition of the Young Men, Apprentices and Seamen, in, and about the City of London (London, 1641); A Relation of the Free and Voluntary Offers of the Trained Bands of the City of London; of the Masters of Ships, Mariners and Seamen; of the Apprentices of London; of the Trained Bands of Southwark, and of the Watermen Upon the Thames to Defend the King and Parliament Against Malignant Councils and Plots of Papists (London, 1642). 14. Henry Gee and William John Hardy, eds., The Root and Branch Petition in Documents Illustrative of English Church History (New York: Macmillan, 1896), 537–39; Nicholas Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism, 1530–1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 127; John Morrill, “The Attack on the Church of England in the Long Parliament,” in Nature of the English Revolution, 69 –90; Manning, The English People and the English Revolution, 1640–1649 (London: Heinemann, 1976, 1991), 5; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 325. 15. Conrad Russell, “Why Did Charles I Call the Long Parliament?” in Peter Gaunt, ed., The English Civil War: The Essential Readings (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 128 –36, and The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 156 (see 149 –60 for Russell’s view of the debates concerning the monarch’s constitutional powers regarding taxation); Glenn Burgess, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution: An Introduction to English Political Thought, 1603–1642 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 201–3; Willson Havelock Coates, ed., The Journal of Sir Simonds D’Ewes from the First Recess of the Long Parliament to the Withdrawal of the King from London (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1942), 335 – 44, hereafter D’Ewes Journal; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 331–32; Fletcher, Outbreak of the English Civil War, 97–99. 16. Commons Journal, 2:125 –26; Violet Rowe, Sir Henry Vane the Younger: A Study in Political and Administrative History (London: Athlone, 1970), 10–11; John Rushworth, The Trial of Thomas, Earl of Strafford, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Upon an Impeachment of High Treason (London, 1721), 51; Paul Christianson, “The Peers, the People, and Parliamentary Management in the First Six Months of the Long Parliament,” Journal of Modern History 49, no. 4 (1977): 575 –99. 17. A Preamble with the Protestation (London, 1641); David Cressy, “The Protestation Protested, 1641 and 1642,” Historical Journal 45, no. 2 (2002): 251–79, quote on 279; Walter, Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution, 293 –96, 304 –5; Fletcher, Outbreak of the English Civil War, 15 –16, 26, 77, 78; Edward Vallance, “Preaching to the Converted: Religious Justifications for the English Civil War,” Huntington Library Quarterly 65, nos. 3 – 4 (2002): 395 – 419; Henry Burton, The Protestation Protested: or, a Short Remonstrance, Showing What is

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Principally Required of all Those That Have or Do Take the Last Parliamentary Protestation (London, 1641); England’s Bondage and Hope of Deliverance (London, 1641); Katherine Chidley, The Justification of the Independent Churches of Christ (London, 1641). 18. Edward Whitson, The Life and Death of Mr. Henry Jessey (London, 1671), 11; A Remonstrance of the State of the Kingdom of England (London, 1641), 4 –6; Rowe, Henry Vane, 191; J. H. Adamson and H. F. Folland, Sir Harry Vane: His Life and Times, 1613–1662 (Boston: Gambit, 1973), 164 –66. Despite Vane’s unsettled thinking on church organization at this time, Adamson and Folland make a rather weak case that Vane could not have assisted in drafting the religious clauses outlined in section 184; they argue that he would never have endorsed such a rigid form of church discipline. 19. For an infamous example of this anti–Irish Catholic propaganda, see John Temple, The Irish Rebellion: or the History of the Beginning and First Progress of the General Rebellion Raised . . . [in] October 1641 (London, 1641). For Charles’s reaction to the rebellion, see Cust, Charles I, 311; W. Bray, ed., The Diary and Correspondence of John Evelyn (London, 1890), 776; Michael Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars (London: Allen Lane, 2008), 181. For the impact of the Irish rising on English politics, see Joseph Cope, England and the 1641 Irish Rebellion ( Rochester, NY: Boydell, 2009). For the rebellion itself, see Jane Ohlmeyer, “The ‘Antrim Plot of 1641’: A Rejoinder,” in Jane Ohlmeyer, ed., Ireland from Independence to Occupation, 1641–1660 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 431–38; Nicholas Canny, “What Really Happened in Ireland in 1641,” in ibid., 24 – 42. 20. A Speech Made by Master Waller in the Honorable House of Commons Concerning Episcopacy (London, 1641), 4 –6; David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric, and Politics, 1627–1660 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 104 –5; D’Ewes Journal, 270–72; The Citizens of London Humble Petition . . . Subscribed with the Names of About Twenty Thousand, Both Aldermen, Aldermen’s Deputies, Merchants, Common Council Men, etc . . . (London, 1641); Manning, English People and the English Revolution, 66; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 366. 21. CSPD, 1641–1643, 210, 218; HMC Montague, 141; Cressy, England on Edge, 388 –89, 392: Manning, English People and the English Revolution, 76. 22. A Bloody Massacre Plotted by the Papists Intended First against the City of London (London, 1641), 4 –6; John Venn, A True Relation of the Most Wise and Worthy Speech Made by Captain Venn, One of the Burgesses of the Parliament to the Apprentises of London, Who Rose in Cheapside Upon the Combustion at Westminster on Wednesday Last at Night, December 29 (London, 1641); CSPD 1641– 1643, 191; HMC Montague, 138 –39; Griffith Williams, The Discoverer of Mysteries (London, 1643), 21–23; Manning, Aristocrats, Plebeians, and Revolution in England, 35, 36, and English People and the English Revolution, 92 –93; Cressy, England on Edge, 386, 390, 391. 23. CSPD, 1641–1643, 236 – 41; Allen B. Hinds, ed., Calendar of State Papers Relating to English Affairs in the Archives of Venice, vol. 2, 1640–1642 (London, 1924), 271–77, hereafter CSPV, 1640– 1642; Report on the Manuscripts of Lord Montagu of Bealieu, Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, vol. 53 (London, 1900), 141, hereafter HMC, Montagu]; A True Relation of the Unparalleled Breach of Parliament, by his Majesty, as is Conceived the 4th of January, 1641 (London, 1642). 24. D’Ewes Journal, 381–84, 392; Fletcher, Outbreak of the English Civil War, 179 –82; HMC Montague, 141; CSPD 1641–1643, 241– 45; CSPV 1640–1642, 277; Manning, English People and the English Revolution, 96 –99; Cressy, “The Protestation Protested, 1641 and 1642,” 267. 25. The Apprentices Lamentation Together, With a Doleful Elegy Upon the Manner of the Death of that Worthy, and Valorous Knight Sr. Richard Wiseman, broadsheet (London, 1642); Londons Tears, Upon the Never Too Much to be Lamented Death of our late Worthy Member of the House of Commons, Sr. Richard Wiseman Knight and Baronet, broadsheet (London, 1642); Fletcher, Outbreak of the English Civil War, 172; CSPD 1641–1643, 217. 26. The Humble Petition of Many Thousand Poor People in and About the City of London, broadsheet (London, 1642).

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27. Quote from Brian Manning, “The Outbreak of the English Civil War,” in R. H. Parry, ed., The English Civil War and After (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 12. 28. For more on the Militia Ordinance, see Lois G. Schwoerer, “‘The Fittest Subject for A King’s Quarrel’: An Essay on the Militia Controversy, 1641–1642,” Journal of British Studies 11, no. 1 (1971): 45 –76. 29. Henry Parker and Henry Vane (?), A Political Catechism: Or, Certain Questions About the Government of this Land (London, 1643). For a discussion of A Political Catechism, see Corinne Weston and Janelle Greenberg, Subjects and Sovereigns: The Grand Controversy over Legal Sovereignty in Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 154 –57. For more on Parker, see Michael Mendle, Henry Parker and the English Civil War: The Political Thought of the Public’s Privado (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Vane used the argument from A Political Catechism to defend himself at the Restoration against charges of regicide. He claimed that the commonwealth regimes that he served under upheld the constitutional principles outlined by the king in his answer to the Nineteen Proposals. Many thanks to Janelle Greenberg for drawing my attention to Vane’s constitutional thinking. 30. Weston and Greenberg, Subjects and Sovereigns, 52; David Parnham, Sir Henry Vane, Theologian: A Study in Seventeenth-Century Religious and Political Discourse (Madison, WI: Associated University Presses, 1997), 38, 43, 105. According to Janelle Greenberg and Corrine Weston, Vane, as the probable coauthor of the Catechism, helped set the terms of debate for “the constitutional controversy that marked the remainder of the seventeenth century.” 31. Michael J. Jarvis, “Owen Rowe, 1593 –1661,” in DNB Online (2008); Brenner, Merchants and Revolutionaries, 397–99; Pearl, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution, 324. 32. For publication statistics, see David Cressy, “Revolutionary England, 1640–1642,” Past and Present 178 (2003): 59. My point here is that the neglected labor history of print culture necessarily gets us closer to how some of the most prominent figures discussed in the literature actually experienced life in an age when print had begun to transform it. Scholars, understandably, have examined the flourishing world of print with great interest. For examples, see Sara Waurechen, “Covenanter Propaganda and Conceptualizations of the Public during the Bishops’ Wars, 1638 –1640,” Historical Journal 52, no. 1 (2009): 63 –86; Peter McCullough, “Print, Publication, and Religious Politics in Caroline England,” Historical Journal 51, no. 2 (2008): 285 –313; Adrian Johns, “Coleman Street,” Huntington Library Quarterly 71, no. 1 (2008): 33 –54; David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Rhetoric, Poetry, and Politics, 1627–1660 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Blair Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). But as enlightening as this work has been, its fixation with language, presentation, and reading, including print’s part in the creation of a so-called public sphere, has tended to minimize or even neglect print culture’s intersection with the history of revolutionary political labor. 33. For more on the relation between print, popular and elite politics, and the creation of the public sphere, see Peter Lake and Stephen Pincus, eds., The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008). Lake and Pincus’s book demonstrates how early modern English historians, having made some conceptual refinements and even some thoroughgoing innovations, now see the origins of the public sphere not, as Habermas first argued, in the late eighteenth century but rather in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. 34. David Como, “Secret Printing, the Crisis of 1640, and the Origins of Civil War Radicalism,” Past and Present 196 (2007): 37–82. Also see Perez Zagorin, “The Authorship of Man’s Mortalitie,” Library 3 (1950): 179 –183; H. R. Plomer, “Secret Printing during the Civil War,” Library 5 (1904); Keith Sprunger, Trumpets from the Tower: English Puritan Printing in the Netherlands, 1600–1640 (New York: E. J. Brill, 1994). 35. Como, “Secret Printing,” 49 –50. Como credits Keith Lindley with discovering the record of the House of Lords’ investigation into Welles’s printing activities.

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36. Samuel How, The Sufficiency of the Spirit’s Teaching without Human Learning (London, 1640); Como, “Secret Printing,” 80–81 and n73. 37. John Taylor, New Preachers New (London, 1640), frontispiece; A Three Fold Discourse Between Three Neighbors, Algate, Bishopgate, and John of Heyden, the Late Cobbler of Hounsditch, a Professed Brownist (London, 1642), A2. 38. John Taylor, A Swarm of Sectaries and Schismatics: Wherein is Discovered the Strange Preaching (or Prating) of . . . Cobblers, Tinkers, Peddlers, Weavers, Sow-Gelders and Chimney Sweepers (London, 1641), 7–9; Mad-Fashions, Odd Fashions, All Out of Fashions, or The Emblems of these Distracted Times (London, 1642), title page. 39. Taylor, Mad-Fashions, Odd Fashions, All Out of Fashions, n.p., and Swarm of Sectaries, 10, 12. 40. Bernard Capp, The World of John Taylor the Water Poet (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 150; John Taylor, Mad Verse, Sad Verse, Glad Verse and Bad Verse Cut Out, and Slenderly Stitched Together (London, 1644), 3 – 4. 41. Dagmar Freist, Governed by Opinion: Politics, Religion, and the Dynamics of Communication in Stuart London, 1637–1645 (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 1997), 99 –100; Plommer, “Secret Printing during the Civil War,” 393, 394; England’s Complaint to Jesus Christ, Against the Bishops Canons of the Late Sinful Synod, a Seditious Conventicle, a Pack of Hypocrites, a Sworn Confederacy, a Traitorous Conspiracy (London, 1640), n.p. For the ancient constitution and Carolineera political thought and resistance theory, see Weston and Greenberg, Subjects and Sovereigns; Janelle Greenberg, The Radical Face of the Ancient Constitution: St. Edward’s “Laws” in Early Modern Political Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Alan Cromartie, “The Constitutionalist Revolution: The Transformation of Political Culture in Early Stuart England,” Past and Present 163 (1999): 76 –120; J. P. Sommerville, Royalists and Patriots: Politics and Ideology in England, 1603–1640 (London: Longman, 1986). 42. John Morrill, “Rhetoric and Action: Charles I, Tyranny, and the English Revolution,” in Gordon Schochet, ed., with Patricia Tatspaugh and Carol Brobeck, Religion, Resistance, and Civil War (Washington, DC: Folger Institute for the History of British Political Thought, 1992), 91–114; Morrill, “Charles I, Tyranny, and the English Civil War,” in The Nature of the English Revolution: Essays by John Morrill (New York: Longman, 1993 ), 285 –306; England’s Complaint to Jesus Christ, Against the Bishops Canons, n.p. 43. England’s Complaint to Jesus Christ, Against the Bishops Canons, n.p., also quoted in Como, “Secret Printing,” 65. For early modern resistance theory, see Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Liberty: The Reformation, 2 vols. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978, 2000), vol. 2, pt. 3. For more on the roots of English Revolutionary politics in the popular politics of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, see Walter, “English People and the English Revolution Revisited,” 171–82. 44. John Goodwin, The Saints Interest in God (London, 1640), 166, See John Coffey’s insightful analysis of Goodwin’s early political writing in his John Goodwin and the Puritan Revolution: Religion and Intellectual Change in Seventeenth-Century England (Rochester, NY: Boydell and Brewer, 2006), 66 –96 (also see 64 –65 for Coffey’s discussion of Goodwin’s sermons in the 1630s). 45. John Goodwin, The Butcher’s Blessing, or the Bloody Intentions of Romish Cavaliers on the City of London . . . (London, 1642), 1; Keith Lindley, “London and Popular Freedom,” in R. C. Richardson and G. M. Ridden, eds., Freedom and the English Revolution: Essays in History and Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 122; Pearl, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution, 183; J. C. Spalding, “John Goodwin,” in Richard Greaves and Robert Zaller, eds., Biographical Dictionary of British Seventeenth Century Radicals, 3 vols. (Brighton, UK: Harvester, 1982), 2:16. 46. John Goodwin, Anti-Cavalierisme, or Truth Pleading As well as the Necessity, as the Lawfulness of this Present War (London, 1642), 2, 3, 31.

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47. Ibid., 31; Coffey, John Goodwin and the Puritan Revolution, 86 –90; Manning, Aristocrats, Plebeians and Revolution in England, 1640–1660, 88. 48. Goodwin, Anti-Cavalierisme, 8 –9, 16, 38 –39; Henry Parker, The Case of Shipmoney Briefly Discoursed (London, 1641), 2; Michael Mendle, “The Ship Money Case, The Case of Shipmony, and the Development of Henry Parker’s Parliamentary Absolutism,” Historical Journal 32, no. 3 (1989): 513 –36. For the concept of political slavery in the Revolution, see Quentin Skinner, “Rethinking Political Liberty,” History Workshop Journal 61, no. 1 (2006): 156 –70, esp. 158 –59, and “John Milton and the Politics of Slavery,” in Visions of Politics II: Renaissance Virtue, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 292 –297. 49. Christopher Hill, The English Bible in the Seventeenth Century Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1993), 184; Skinner, “Rethinking Political Liberty,” 158 –59; Hammond, quoted in Coffey, John Goodwin, 90. Also see Hammond’s Of Resisting the Lawful Magistrate upon Colour of Religion (London, 1643). I follow Blair Worden here in my use of the term “constitutional republicanism,” which Worden helpfully distinguishes from “civic republicanism.” In an explanation drawn from the work of Quentin Skinner, Worden defines “constitutional republicanism” as opposition to prerogative institutions of political power, culminating in an aversion to monarchical government. “Civic republicanism,” as Worden details through a discussion of J. G. A. Pocock’s Machiavellian Moment, reflects how the English refined Machiavelli’s Discourses to form an ideal of “political action and civic virtue” in the century leading to up to the English Revolution. See Worden’s instructive essay “Republicanism, Regicide and Republic: The English Experience,” in Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner, eds., Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, 2 vols. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1:307–27, quote on 308.

ch a pter four 1. “Letter from the Commissioners of the Chief Sachems in America, to the Lord Chancellor Hyde, Complaining of Ill-Treatment from the People of Massachusetts, A.D. 1662,” in Samuel Gorton’s Letter to Lord Hyde in Behalf of the Narragansett Sachems (Providence, RI: E. L. Freeman, 1930), 10; Oliver Payne Fuller, The History of Warwick, Rhode Island, from Its Settlement in 1642 to the Present Time (Providence: Angel, Burlingame, 1875), 16, 19 –21; George A. Brayton, “A Defense of Samuel Gorton and the Settlers of Shawomet,” Rhode Island Historical Transactions, no. 17 (1883): 95 –96; Edward Johnson, A History of New England from the English Planting in the Year until the Year 1652 (London, 1653), 185 –87. Johnson’s book is better known as WonderWorking Providence, a phrase he included at the top of every even-numbered page. 2. Philip Gura, “Samuel Gorton and Religious Radicalism in England, 1644 –1648,” William and Mary Quarterly 40, no. 1 (1983): 121–24. 3. See the following for remigration to Old England from New England: Susan Hardman Moore, Pilgrims: New World Settlers and the Call of Home (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007); David Cressy, Coming Over: Migration and Communication between England and New England during the Seventeenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 4. Robert S. Paul, The Assembly of the Lord: Politics and Religion in the Westminster Assembly and the “Grand Debate” (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1985). 5. See Stephen Foster, The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570–1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). Foster’s influential book construes the formation of the “New England Way” as a “long-running English process of adjustments . . . in America” (153). What this formulation ignores is that “English . . . adjustments . . . in America” were not restricted, as Foster and many other puritan scholars have left them, to the internal tensions that the saints brought with them to America. 6. Roger Wood to John Winthrop, September 3, 1644, in C. Ford Worthington, ed., The

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Winthrop Papers, 1498–1628, 5 vols. (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1929), 4:493, hereafter Winthrop Papers. 7. Thomas Goodwin, Phillip Nye, Sidrach Simpson, Jeremiah Burroughs, and William Bridge, An Apologetical Narration (London, 1643); Thomas Edwards, Antapologia, or A Full Answer to the Apologetical Narration of Mr. Goodwin, Mr. Nye, Mr. Simpson, Mr. Burroughs, and Mr. Bridge, members of the Assembly of Divines (London, 1644), epistle conclusion, 11, 12, 13, 28 –30; William Prynne, A Fresh Discovery of Some Prodigious New Wandering-Blazing-Stars and Firebrands . . . Whereunto Some Letters and Papers Lately Sent from the Sommer-Islands, are Subjoined . . . (London, 1646); Nathaniel White, Truth Gloriously Appearing from Under the Sad Sable Cloud of Obloquie, Or a Vindication of the Practice of the Church of Christ in the Summer Islands (London, 1646); William Golding, Servants on Horseback, Or, A Free People Bestrided . . . by Worthless Men (London, 1648). 8. James Savage, ed., The History of New England from 1630–1649 by John Winthrop, Esq., 2 vols. (Boston: Phelps and Farnham, 1825), 2:77–78, 96, hereafter Winthrop’s Journal; New England’s First Fruits (London, 1643), 9, 18; April Lee Hatfield, Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 116 –18; Carla Gardina Pestana, The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640–1661 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 65 –66. Kevin Butterfield has explained how puritanism had a much more vital place in Virginia society before 1650 than most historians have recognized. See his “Puritans and Religious Strife in the Early Chesapeake,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 109, no. 1 (2001): 5 –36. 9. John Davenport, An Answer of the Elders of the Several Churches in New England unto Nine positions, Sent Over to Them, by Divers Reverend and Godly Ministers in England (London, 1643); John Cotton, The Keys to the Kingdom of Heaven, and Power Thereof (London, 1644). For cooperation between Independents in Old and New England during the Westminster Assembly see Francis Bremer, Congregational Communion: Clerical Friendship in the Anglo-American Puritan Community, 1610–1692 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1994), 122 –50. The links connecting the formation of congregational church ways in England and the colonies are discussed in Ralph F. Young, “Breathing the ‘Free Aire of the New World’: The Influence of the New England Way on the Gathering of Congregational Churches in Old England, 1640–1660,” New England Quarterly 83, no. 1 (2010): 5 – 46. 10. John Tinker to John Winthrop, February 26, 1640, Winthrop Papers 4:205; Roger Williams to John Winthrop, August 7, 1640, in Glen W. LaFantasie, ed., The Correspondence of Roger Williams, 2 vols. (Hanover, NH: Brown University Press / University of New England Press, 1988), 1:207; Richard S. Dunn, Puritans and Yankees: The Winthrop Dynasty of New England, 1630–1717 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962), 30–36; Francis Bremer, “In Defense of Regicide: John Cotton and the Execution of Charles I,” William and Mary Quarterly 38, no. 1 (1980): 105 –8; J. F. Maclear, “New England and the Fifth Monarchy: The Quest for the Millennium in Early American Puritanism,” William and Mary Quarterly 32, no. 2 (1975): 235 – 40. 11. Winthrop’s Journal, 2:25, 31, 42; Mary Jeane Anderson Jones, Congregational Commonwealth: Connecticut, 1635–1662 (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1968), 156; Cressy, Coming Over, 240–247; James O’Toole, “New England Reactions to the English Civil Wars,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register 129 (1975): 3 –17. 12. Richard Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 167–68, 531; Pestana, English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 34 –37. For more on Ingle’s career, see Edward Ingle, Captain Richard Ingle: The Maryland Pirate and Rebel, 1642–1653 (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1883). 13. Leo Francis Stock, ed., Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments Respecting North America, 5 vols. (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1924), 1:190–91, here-

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after Proceedings and Debates; for more on colonial responses to England’s troubles, see Pestana’s encyclopedic summary in English Atlantic in Age of Revolution, 25 –52. 14. The political scientist J. S. Maloy has done excellent work recovering the diverse intellectual heritage of the various and sometimes conflicting constitutional mechanisms that settlers devised to create commonwealth forms of colonial government early in the seventeenth century. See his The Colonial Origins of Modern Democratic Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). In his A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), the historian David D. Hall has also produced impressive scholarship on the early history of constitutional reform in New England, stressing the common aversion to arbitrary forms of government that colored the political thought of the region’s godly settlers. But in emphasizing the common features of puritan political thought, Hall underestimates the divisions that the contending visions of Radical and Magisterial Reformation fostered within and between New England’s colonies, going so far in an otherwise subtle and nuanced analysis to mistakenly dismiss the use of the word radical as anachronistic. In truth, in seventeenth-century discourse, radical appears quite frequently as a categorical referent, used (in much the same way that we do today) to denote the application of fundamental principles to programmatic reform. For Hall’s argument against the use of radical, where he follows the misconceived linguistic fundamentalism of Conal Condren and others, see Reforming People, 14 –16. For Hall’s analysis of New England’s constitutional politics in the 1630s and 1640s, see his chapter 2. Despite these criticisms, Hall’s book remains essential reading for anybody interested in how puritan ethics applied to political and social relationships in seventeenth-century New England. 15. Howard Chapin, ed., The Documentary History of Rhode Island, 2 vols. (Providence: Preston and Rounds, 1919, 1979), 2:25; Alison Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 149, 170–71, 174; Samuel Gorton, Simplicity’s Defense against a Seven-Headed Policy (London, 1644), new edition, ed. William R. Staples (Providence: Marshall Brown, 1835), 57n1; Winthrop’s Journal, 2:9. For a welcome exception to the rather exclusive focus on Gorton’s religious thought, see Michelle Burnham’s skillful reading of his politics, which she convincingly connects to the Levellers, in “Samuel Gorton’s Leveller Aesthetics and the Economics of Colonial Dissent,” William and Mary Quarterly 67, no. 3 (2010): 433 –57. 16. Gorton, Simplicity’s Defense, 42; Edward Winslow, Hypocrisy Unmasked: A True Relation of the Proceedings of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Against Samuel Gorton of Rhode Island (London, 1646), new edition, ed. Howard Millar Chapin (Providence: Club for Colonial Reprints, 1916), 67; Nathaniel Morton, New England’s Memorial or, A Brief Relation of the Most Memorable and Remarkable Passages of the Providence of God Manifested to the Planters of New England in America (Cambridge, 1669), 108 –9; Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, ed., Records of the Colony of New Plymouth in New England, 12 vols. (Boston: Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 1856), 1:105; Philip Gura, A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England, 1620–1660 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1984), 278 –80. 17. Andrew Delbanco, The Puritan Ordeal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989) 139; John Russell Bartlett, ed., Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations in New England, vol. 1, 1636–1663 (Providence, 1857), 52 –53; Gorton quoted in Peter Force, ed., Tracts and Other Papers Relating Principally to Origin, Settlement, and Progress of the Colonies in North America (Washington, 1846), 94. For more on Aspinwall’s millennialism during his stay in New England, see Stephen Lee Robbins, “Manifold Afflictions: The Life and Writings of William Aspinwall,” PhD diss., Oklahoma State University, 1988. 18. Chapin, ed., Documentary History of Rhode Island, 2:48 – 49. 19. Bartlett, ed., Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, 69 –71; Winthrop’s Journal, 1:297; Maloy, Colonial Origins of Modern Democratic Thought, 162 –64. For

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Tortuga, see John Esquemeling, The Buccaneers of America (London, 1684; rpt. New York, 1883), chaps. 1–7. 20. William Aspinwall, A Volume Relating to the Early History of Boston Containing the Aspinwall Notarial Records from 1644–1651 (Boston Municipal Printing Office, 1903), i–iv; Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 2nd ser., vol. 12 (1897–99), 212; Henry Melville King, A Summer Visit of Three Rhode Islanders to the Massachusetts Bay in 1651 (Providence, 1896),16 –18; Chapin, ed., Documentary History of Rhode Island, 2:viii; Winslow, Hypocrisy Unmasked, 53 –55. 21. John Callendar, An Historical Discourse on the Civil and Religious Affairs of the Colony of Rhode Island (Providence: Knowles, Vose, 1838), 210–13; Bartlett, ed., Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, 111–15. 22. Maloy, Colonial Origins of Modern Democratic Thought, 34 –36, 96. For a summary of the text and accompanying circumstance of Charles’s declaration, see A True and Exact Relation of the Manner in Which His Majesty’s Setting Up His Standard at Nottingham on Monday the 22 of August, 1642 (London, 1642). 23. Callendar, Historical Discourse, 213; Bartlett, ed., Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, 111–15; John Clarke, Ill News from New England, or A Narrative of New England’s Persecution Wherein is Declared That While Old England is Becoming New, New England is Becoming Old (London, 1652), rpt. in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 4th ser., vol. 11 (Boston, 1854), 3, 4. 24. Clarke, Ill News from New England, 5, 7. 25. Israel Stoughton to John Stoughton, ca. 1634, in Everett Emerson, ed., Letters from New England: The Massachusetts Bay Colony, 1629–1638 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1976), 146, also quoted in Maloy, Colonial Origins of Modern Democratic Thought, 146; Winthrop’s Journal, 1:74 –75, 128 –29; Shurtleff, ed., Records of Massachusetts, 1:135 –36 ; W. Noel Sainsbury, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, 1574–1660 (London, 1860), 179; Roger Thomson, Divided We Stand: Watertown, Massachusetts, 1630–1680 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 41– 42. 26. Winthrop Papers, 3:201–206; Albert Van Dusen, Puritans in the Wilderness: Connecticut History to 1763 (Chester, CT: Pequot, 1975), 26 –28. 27. “Articles Between the English in Connecticut and the Indian Sachems” (the Hartford Treaty), rpt. in Alden T. Vaughan, New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians, 1620–1675 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965, 1979), 340– 42; Israel Stoughton to the governor and Council of Massachusetts, August 14, 1637, in Winthrop Papers, 3:483; J. Hammond Trumbull, ed., The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut (Hartford, CT: Lockwood and Brainard, 1850–90), 4:72; Michael Leroy Oberg, Dominion and Civility: English Imperialism and Native America, 1585–1665 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 116 –17; R. W. Roetger, “Theophilus Eaton, 1590–1658,” in American National Biography, online ed. (2000); Estelle F. Feinstein, “Edward Hopkins, 1600–1658,” in ibid.; Van Dusen, Puritans in the Wilderness, 97; Winthrop Jordan, “The Influence of the West Indies on the Origins of New England Slavery,” William and Mary Quarterly 18, no. 2 (1961): 245 – 47; Oscar Reiss, Blacks in Colonial America (London: McFarland, 1997), 72. 28. For a valuable discussion of the new dynamics at work in settler-Indian politics following the Pequot War, see Jenny Hale Pulsipher, Subject unto the Same King: Indians and the Contest for Authority in Early New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 21–25. 29. Thomas Hooker, “Abstracts of Two Sermons,” in C. J. Hoadley, ed., Collections of the Connecticut Historical Society (1860), 1:20; “Letter to Governor Winthrop,” in ibid., 1:12; A Survey of the Summe of Church Discipline, 2 vols. (1648; rpt. New York: Arno, 1972), 1:188; Jones, Congregational Commonwealth, 71; Van Dusen, Puritans in the Wilderness, 35 –36. 30. “The Fundamental Orders of Connecticut,” in Francis Newton Thorpe, ed., The Federal and State Constitutions, Colonial Charters, and Other Organic Laws of the States, Territories and

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Colonies Now or Heretofore Forming the United States of America (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1909), 519 –23; Jones, Congregational Communion, 73 –81. I have borrowed heavily here from Maloy’s impressive analysis of Hooker’s political thought. See his Colonial Origins of Modern Democratic Thought, 98 –104, 143 –61. 31. Winthrop Papers, 3:466; W. C. Ford, “Cotton’s Moses His Judicials,” Massachusetts Historical Society Proceedings 16 (1903): 274 –84. 32. C. J. Hoadly, ed., Records of the Colony and Plantation of New Haven, from 1638 to 1649 (Hartford, 1857), 11–17. 33. Maloy, Colonial Origins of Modern Democratic Thought, 125; “The Massachusetts Body of Liberties,” in Old South Leaflets (Boston: Directors of the Old South Work), 7:261–67; Winthrop’s Journal, 2:59 –60, 64, 86 –88; Records of Massachusetts, 2:5, 20, 21; Ellen Elizabeth Brennan, “The Massachusetts Council of the Magistrates,” New England Quarterly 4, no. 1 (1931): 54 –93. A lawsuit over “Goody Sherman’s sow” supplied the unlikely backdrop for the colony’s constitutional crisis of the early 1640s. Having been chronicled in depth elsewhere, I have chosen not to cover it here. 34. Winthrop Papers, 4:282. For Winthrop on the monster births, see Winthrop’s Journal, 1:261–64. For other responses to Ward and Saltonstall, see “John Norton and the Elders of Ipswich, Concerning the Negative Vote, June 22, 1643,” in Robert E. Moody, ed., The Saltonstall Papers, 2 vols. (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1972, 1974), 1:278 –81. For more on the magisterial reformers’ fear of the commonality’s political and economic aspirations in early New England, see Thomas Ingersoll, “Riches and Honour Were Rejected by Them as Loathsome Vomit,” in Carla Pestana and Sharon Salinger, eds., Inequality in Early America (Hanover, NH: New England University Press, 1999), 46 –66. 35. John Winthrop, A Short Story of the Rise, Reign, and Ruin of the Antinomians, Familists, and Libertines (London, 1644), rpt. in David D. Hall, ed., The Antinomian Controversy, 1636–1638: A Documentary History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1968, 1990), 280–82; Anne Jacobson Schutte, “‘Such Monstrous Births’: A Neglected Aspect of the Antinomian Controversy,” Renaissance Quarterly 38, no. 1 (1985): 85 –106; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “John Winthrop’s City of Women,” Massachusetts Historical Review 3 (2001): 26 –28; Karyn Valerius, “‘So Manifest a Signe from Heaven’: Monstrosity and Heresy in the Antinomian Controversy,” New England Quarterly 83, no. 2 (2010): 179 –99. 36. “Richard Saltonstall and Others to the Governor, Deputy Governor, Assistants, and Elders, July 14, 1643, “ in Moody, ed., Saltonstall Papers, 1:398 – 400. For the General Court’s debate over the prospect of war with the French, see Winthrop’s Journal, 2:109 –15. My thanks to Mark A. Peterson for allowing me to read a draft of the first chapter of his forthcoming book on early Boston, which features a section on the La Tour affair from which I have learned much. 37. “The Articles of Confederation of the United Colonies of New England, May 19, 1643,” in Thorpe, ed., Federal and State Constitutions; Benjamin Trumbull, A Complete History of Connecticut, Civil and Ecclesiastical, from the Emigration of its First Planters from England, in MDCXXX, to MDCCXXIII (Hartford, 1797), 125; Maloy, Colonial Origins of Modern Democratic Thought, 150; Jones, Congregational Commonwealth, 87. 38. Michael Leroy Oberg, “‘We Are All the Sachems from East to West’: A New Look at Miantonomi’s Campaign of Resistance,” New England Quarterly 77, no. 3 (2004): 478 –99; Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England, 1500–1643 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982, 1984), 233; Miantanomi quoted in Lion Gardiner, “Lieft Lion Gardiner His Relation of the Pequot Warres,” Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3rd ser., 3 (1833): 152 –54. 39. Winthrop’s Journal, 2:130–34; Oberg, “We Are All the Sachems from East to West,” 495 –97; Salisbury, Manitou and Providence, 231–35. 40. Oberg, Dominion and Civility, 95 –96; Peter A. Thomas, In the Maelstrom of Change: The

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Indian Trade and Cultural Process in the Middle Connecticut Valley, 1635–1665 (New York: Garland, 1979, 1990), 56; Pulsipher, Subjects unto the Same King, 27; Winthrop’s Journal, 2:84 –85, 120–23; Winslow, Hypocrisy Unmasked, 56 –58; Gorton, Simplicity’s Defense, 47– 49, 53. For more background on the Arnold faction, see Gorton, Simplicity’s Defense, 50, and Correspondence of Roger Williams, 1:156. 41. Gorton, Simplicity’s Defense, 42, 43, 50–54, 57–59; Brayton, “Defense of Samuel Gorton and the Settlers of Shawomet,” 63 –65; Chapin, ed., Documentary History of Rhode Island, 2:87–90; John Garrett, Roger Williams: Witness beyond Christendom, 1603–1683 (London: CollierMacmillan, 1970), 22. 42. Gorton, Simplicity’s Defense, 30, 64, 70, 79. For more on the ancient constitution’s application in early New England, see James S. Hart and Richard J. Ross, “The Ancient Constitution in the Old World and the New,” in Francis Bremer and Lynn A. Botelho, eds., The World of John Winthrop: Essays on England and New England, 1588–1649 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2005). 43. Gorton, Simplicity’s Defense, 80; Winslow, Hypocrisy Unmasked, 28, 34, 43, 44. Winslow reprinted letters from Gorton and his allies in this tract. 44. Gorton, Simplicity’s Defense, 69; Winslow, Hypocrisy Unmasked, 29, 34, 35. 45. For eyewitness accounts of the Bay Colony’s attack on Shawomet, see Gorton, Simplicity’s Defense, 102 –18; for Gorton’s rendering of the events, written nineteen years later, see his “Letter to Lord Hyde on Behalf of the Narragansett Sachems” (1662), 10–12; for the trial of the Gortonists in Boston, see Simplicity’s Defense, 119 –35, and “Letter to Lord Hyde on Behalf of the Narragansett Sachems,” 13. For other evidence concerning the attack, trial, and conviction of the Gortonists, see Winthrop’s Journal, 2:139, 143; Shurtleff, ed., Records of Massachusetts, 2:51–52; for good secondhand accounts of the episode, see Brayton, “Defense of Samuel Gorton and the Settlers of Shawomet,” 93 –97; Robert Emmett Wall Jr., Massachusetts Bay: The Crucial Decade, 1640–1650 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972), 134 – 45. 46. For Gorton’s release, see Winthrop’s Journal, 2:156, and Gorton, Simplicity’s Defense, 147– 49; for the negotiations between the Gortonists and the Narragansetts, see Simplicity’s Defense, 153 –58; for the text of the Narragansetts’ submission to the English state and its laws, and the separate notifications of the same sent to Massachusetts by the Narragansetts and the Gortonists, see ibid., 158 –65. On the use of English law in relation to the settling of colonial political and legal conflicts in general, see Mary Sarah Bilder, The Trans-Atlantic Constitution: Colonial Legal Culture and the Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 47. James Ernst, Roger Williams: New England Firebrand (New York: AMS, 1932, 1969), 223. The quote is taken from Henry Vane’s remarks to the court during his trial for treason after the Restoration. See “The Trial of Sir Henry Vane,” in William Cobbett, ed., Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason and Other Crimes and Misdemeanors (London, 1810), 6:196. 48. Ernst, Roger Williams, 230; Staples, ed., Simplicity’s Defense, 253; Winthrop, Short Story, 214, 218, 275, 279 –82. Also see James Mosely, John Winthrop’s World: History as a Story, the Story as History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 93, 123 –26; Raymond P. Stearns, “The Weld-Peter Mission to England,” Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts 32 (1934): 188 –246. 49. Winthrop, Short Story, 253 –54. 50. Lee Travers, “Edward Winslow (1595 –1655),” in Lawrence Goldman, ed., Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; online ed. 2008), hereafter DNB Online (2008); Winslow, Hyprocrisy Unmasked, 7, 73 –74. The phrase “come over and help us” is found in Acts 16:9, where the apostle Paul is called in a dream to begin converting the Macedonians. My thanks to Ruth Goring for this citation.

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51. For the text of the charter Williams acquired for Providence and Aquidneck, see Staples, ed., Simplicity’s Defense, 259 –62; for the text of Gorton’s charter for Shawomet, see Winthrop’s Journal, 2:280–82. 52. Gorton, Simplicity’s Defense, 101–62, quote on 158. 53. For the relationship between colonization and indigenous peoples in English humanist thought, see chapter 1, 18 –19, 21, 24 –25, and chapter 2, 60–63; Pulsipher, Subjects unto the Same King, 17–18. 54. Samuel Gorton, An Incorruptible Key Composed of the CX Psalme Wherewith You May Open the Rest of the Holy Scriptures (London, 1647), 1. For more on Gorton’s religiosity, see Gura, Glimpse of Sion’s Glory, 276 –303, and “The Radical Ideology of Samuel Gorton: New Light on the Relation of English to American Puritanism,” William and Mary Quarterly 36, no. 1 (1979): 78 –100; Kenneth W. Porter, “Samuell Gorton: New England Firebrand,” New England Quarterly 7, no. 1 (1934): 405 –54. For Gorton before the Committee of Foreign Plantations, see Jonathan Beecher Field, Errands into the Metropolis: New England Dissidents in Revolutionary London (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2009), 48 –71. 55. Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America (London, 1643), new edition ed. John J. Teunissen and Evelyn J. Hinz (Detroit, 1973); Christopher Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), 100; Field, Errands into the Metropolis 26 – 47. 56. Williams, Key into the Language of America, 53, 56. 57. Ibid., 97–104, 203; Perry Miller, Roger Williams: His Contribution to the American Tradition (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953), 59; Jack L. Davis, “Roger Williams among the Narragansett Indians,” New England Quarterly 43 (1970): 593 –604; Keith Stavely, “Roger Williams and the Enclosed Gardens of New England,” in Francis Bremer, ed., Puritanism: Transatlantic Perspectives on a Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Faith (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1993), 270–75. William Walywn, Walwyn’s Just Defense Against the Aspersions Cast Upon Him in a Late Unchristian Pamphlet Entitled Walwyn’s Wiles (London, 1649), 8 –9; Denne quoted in Thomas Edwards, Gangreana: or a Catalogue and Discovery. . . . of the Many Errors of this Time (London, 1646), 49. 58. This paragraph and the following draw heavily from Keith Stavely’s brilliant analysis of Williams’s work in “Roger Williams and the Enclosed Gardens of New England,” 257–76. Jonathan Beecher Field’s chapter on Williams is also useful but overemphasizes the importance of print culture in Williams’s endeavors at the expense of his on-the-ground labors with the Narragansetts. See Field’s chapter on Williams in Errands into the Metropolis, 26 – 47. 59. Stavely reproduces the vertical translation code of A Key in “Roger Williams and the Enclosed Gardens of New England,” 267. 60. Chapin, Documentary History of Rhode Island, 1:212 –13.

chapter five 1. Wentworth Day and William Rainsborough’s military careers can be traced in the chapter on Colonel Thomas Harrison’s regiment in Charles Firth and Godfrey Davies, The Regimental History of Cromwell’s Army (Oxford: Clarendon, 1940), 175 –85. For contemporary accounts and other documents relating to the mutiny at Ware, see Frances Maseres, ed., Select Tracts Relating to the Civil Wars in England in the Reign of King Charles I (London, 1815), xxxiii; xl–xlii, xlv–xlvi, lv–lviii. Two of the five regiments at Ware had come against orders, although Leveller sentiment did run through the other three regiments as well. 2. For a sampling of the vast historiography on English republicanism, see Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), and Visions of Politics,

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3 vols. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Jonathan Scott, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), and Commonwealth Principles: Republican Writing of the English Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); J. G. A. Pocock ( James Harrington), The Commonwealth of Oceana and a System of Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), introduction, and The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975); Blair Worden, “Harrington’s Oceana: Origins and Aftermath, 1651–1660,” in David Wootton, ed., Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 1649–1776 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 111–39, “James Harrington and the Commonwealth of Oceana, 1656,” in ibid., 82 –110, and “Marchamont Nedham and the Beginnings of English Republicanism,” in ibid., 45 –81. 3. J. H. Adamson and H. F. Folland, Sir Harry Vane: His Life and Times, 1613–1662 (Boston: Gambit, 1973), 183 –203, 220–25; Violet Ann Rowe, Sir Henry Vane the Younger: A Study in Political and Administrative History (London: Athlone, 1970) 63, 195 –96; Ruth E. Mayers, “Sir Henry Vane (1613 –1662),” in Lawrence Goldsman, ed., Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; online ed. 2008), hereafter DNB Online (2008). For the religious thought behind the Solemn League and Covenant, see Edward Vallance, “‘An Holy and Sacramentall Paction’: Federal Theology and the Solemn League and Covenant in England,” English Historical Review 116, no. 465 (2001): 50–75. Cromwell’s decisive part in the victory at Marston Moor in July 1644 helped create the political space two months later for the Accommodation Order, which the general cosponsored with Vane in the House of Commons to safeguard the gathered churches. At the behest of the Presbyterian elite, however, the Independent clerics who benefited most from the legislation agreed to stop gathering more churches and, ironically in light of Vane’s patronage, to assist more readily in opposing antinomian opinion. 4. Ordinance of the Lords and Commons Assembled in Parliament, for the Discharging of the Members of both Houses from all Offices, both Military and Civil (the Self-Denying Ordinance), in John Rushworth, ed., Historical Collections of Private Passages of State, 12 vols. (London, 1721–22), 6:16; C. H. Firth, The House of Lords during the Civil War (London, 1910), 143 –51. 5. Louise Breen, “Religious Radicalism in the Puritan Officer Corps: Heterodoxy, the Artillery Company, and Cultural Integration in Seventeenth Century Boston,” New England Quarterly 68, no. 1 (1995): 19; Hanserd Knollys, A Moderate Answer to Dr. Bastwick’s Book called Independency Not God’s Ordinance (London, 1645), 2; Knollys (with William Kiffin) The Life and Death of that Old Disciple of Jesus Christ . . . Hanserd Knollys (London, 1692), 20, 22; Knollys, Christ Exalted: or A Lost Sinner Saved by Christ (London, 1646), A2; Thomas Edwards, Gangraena: or a Catalogue and Discovery. . . . of the Many Errors of this Time, 3 vols. (London, 1646), 1:40, 97–98. 6. Hugh Peter, Mr. Peter’s Message from Sir Thomas Fairfax (London, 1646), 5 –6; Edwards, Gangreana, 1:99, 183; Thomas Edwards, The Second and Third Parts of Gangreana (London, 1646), 3:27, 146. For more on Peter, see Raymond P. Stearns, The Strenuous Puritan, 1598–1660 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1954); A. L. Rowse, Four Caroline Portraits: Thomas Hobbes, Henry Marten, Hugh Peters, John Selden (London: Duckworth, 1993). 7. Richard Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae, or, Mr. Richard Baxter’s Narrative of the Most Memorable Passages of His Life and Times (London, 1696), 1:49 –51; Edwards, Gangreana, 1:16, 75; 2:114, 104. 8. Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae, 49 –51; John Lilburne, England’s Birthright Justified (London, 1645), A, 4 –5, 33. Jason Peacey has argued convincingly that Lilburne’s positions in 1645 reflected his alliance with Independents in Parliament, although I disagree with Peacey’s claim that Lilburne had not “developed a radical ideology” by this point (628). See Peacey’s “John Lilburne and the Long Parliament,” Historical Journal 43, no. 3 (2000): 625 – 45. Lilburne’s use of “republic” was not rare at this time. William Prynne, for instance, signed the dedication to his

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1645 tirade against antinomianism as “the Republic’s and the Church’s most dedicated servant.” Prynne enlisted the term in the older fashion employed by the commonwealth writers of the late sixteenth century. But in contrast to Prynne, Lilburne, by impugning prerogative government, was using “republic” in the revolutionary fashion that the Levellers and other radicals of the period would later employ. See Prynne, A Fresh Discovery (London, 1646), n.p. (end of the “dedicatory”). 9. Although heresiographers such as Edwards wrote to inflame public opinion against the radicals, they did not fabricate the antimonarchical sentiment that animated many but surely not all of the soldiers. See Report on the Manuscripts of His Grace the Duke of Portland, 8 vols. (London: Historical Manuscripts Commission), 3:156; Edwards, Gangreana, 3:23; and Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae, 1:51 for quotes. For more on the Norman Yoke, see Christopher Hill, “The Norman Yoke,” in Hill, ed., Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the 17th Century (London: Schocken Books, 1964); and R. B. Seaberg, “The Norman Conquest and the Common Law: The Levellers and the Argument from Continuity,” Historical Journal 24, no. 4 (1981): 791–806. For more on early political radicalism in the English Revolution, see Samuel Dennis Glover, “The Putney Debates: Popular versus Elitist Republicanism,” Past and Present 164 (1999): 47–51; David Wootton, “From Rebellion to Revolution: The Crisis of the Winter of 1642 /3 and the Origins of Civil War Radicalism,” English Historical Review 105, no. 416 (1990): 654 –69. 10. The lord mayor sought to enforce an anti–lay preaching act that had just passed in Parliament. 11. Murray Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 60–61, 126; Edwards, Gangreana, 1:91, 94, 166; Prynne, Fresh Discovery, 13 –14; Edward Drapes, A Plain and Faithful Discovery of a Beam in Mr. Edwards’ Eye (London, 1646), 21–25. 12. Edwards, Gangreana, 1:11–38, 135; 2:151. For other works that made Coleman Street infamous before the establishment of the republic, see Robert Baillie, Anabaptism, The True Fountain of Independency (London, 1647), and A Spiritual Dissuasive against the Errors of the Time (London, 1647); Ephraim Pagitt, Heresiography (London, 1645, 1646, 1647, 1648); Samuel Rutherford, A Survey of the Spiritual Anti Christ (London, 1648). Also see works by John Taylor: Mad-Fashions, Odd Fashions, All Out of Fashions, or The Emblems of these Distracted Times (London, 1642); Mad Verse, Sad Verse, Glad Verse and Bad Verse Cut Out, and Slenderly Sticht Together (London, 1644); New Preachers New (London, 1640); A Swarme of Sectaries, and Schismatiques: Wherein is Discovered the Strange Preaching (or Prating) of such as are by their trades Coblers, Tinkers, Peddlers, Weavers, Sow-Gelders and Chimney Sweepers (London, 1641); A Three Fold Discourse Between Three Neighbors, Algate, Bishopgate, and John of Heyden, the Late Cobbler of Hounsditch, a Professed Brownist (London, 1642). The neighborhood also functioned as shorthand for the dangers of religious enthusiasm for royalists, although after the Restoration the ward could be viewed with less alarm and more ridicule in the work of playwrights such as Abraham Cowley, whose Cutter of Coleman Street a Comedy: The Scene London, in the Year 1658 (London, 1663, 1693) enjoyed a long run on stage and in print. For more on Coleman Street as a symbol of radical excess, see Adrian Johns, “Coleman Street,” Huntington Library Quarterly 71, no. 1 (2008): 33 –54. 13. Henry Jessey, The Exceeding Riches of Grace Advanced by the Spirit of Grace (London, 1647), 95 –98; Edward Barber, The Anabaptists Catechism (London, 1645), 4 –6; Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 52, 57, 60–61; B. R. White, “Henry Jessey, A Pastor in Politics,” Baptist Quarterly 25 (1973 –74): 99 –101; Philip Gura, A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory: Puritan Radicalism in New England, 1620–1660 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1984), 13, 97, 108, 110, 137; Ernest A. Payne, “Thomas Tillam,” Baptist Quarterly 17 (1957): 61–66; B. R. White, “Two Letters from John Clarke to Robert Bennet,” Baptist Quarterly 27 (1977–78): 142 – 46. The four historical “monarchies” usually cited by such millennialists were the Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and Roman empires.

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14. Paul Hobson, The Fallacy of Infant Baptism Discovered (London, 1645), 9, Practical Divinity: or a Help through the Blessing of God to Lead Men More to Look within Themselves (London, 1646), and A Garden enclosed, and Wisdom Justified Only of Her Children (London, 1647); Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 67, 85. 15. Edwards, Gangreana, 1:84 –86; Cathy Hartley, A Historical Dictionary of British Women (London: Europa, 2005), 48 – 49; Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1972, 1991), 84, 140, 151. 16. Edwards, Gangreana, 1:84 –89; 2:19, 144; Katherine Gillespie, “A Hammer in Her Hand: The Separation of Church from State and the Early Feminist Writings of Katherine Chidley,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 17, no. 2 (1998): 213 –33. For Dina and Sarah Wight, see Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon, 2001), 88 –90. For more on Chidley, Wight, and Attaway, see Stephen Davies, Unbridled Spirits: Women of the English Revolution, 1640–1660 (London: Women’s Press, 1998), 95 –135. For Anna (or Hannah) Trapnell, see her The Cry of a Stone (London, 1654); James Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle during the English Revolution (London: Verso, 2000), 257–304; Hilary Hinds, God’s Englishwomen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 90–103, 122 –28, 150–70. Phyllis Mack’s comprehensive Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992) remains indispensable for understanding the radical nature of female prophecy during the revolutionary era. For women as citizens in the English Revolution, see Patricia Crawford, “‘The Poorest She’: Women and Citizenship in Early Modern England,” in Michael Mendle, ed., The Putney Debates of 1647: The Army, the Levellers, and the English State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 203 –16. 17. Richard Elyman, The Hunting of the Fox or The Sectaries Dissected (London, 1648), 14; Rutherford, Survey of the Spiritual Anti Christ, 52, 176 –272. For more on Rutherford’s political and religious thought, see John Coffey, Politics, Religion, and the British Revolutions: The Mind of Samuel Rutherford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 18. Philip Gura, “Samuel Gorton and Religious Radicalism in England, 1644 –1648,” William and Mary Quarterly 40, no. 1 (1983): 121–24; “The Radical Ideology of Samuel Gorton: New Light on the Relation of English Puritanism,” William and Mary Quarterly 36, no. 1 (1979): 78 –100. 19. Edwards, Gangreana, 1:81, 91–93. 20. Edwards, Gangreana, 1:28, 77; 3:30–31; “(Samuel Gorton’s) Letter to Nathaniel Morton, 30 June 1669,” in Peter Force, ed., Tracts and Other Papers, 4 vols. (Washington, DC, 1836 – 46), 4: no. 7. 21. Samuel Gorton, An Incorruptible Key Composed of the CX Psalm (London, 1647). 22. Ibid., 2, 4. The verses in the King James Bible read: The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool. The Lord shall send the rod of thy strength out of Zion: rule thou in the midst of thine enemies. 23. Gorton, Incorruptible Key to the CX Psalm, 4, 28 –30; Edward Winslow, The Danger of Tolerating Levellers in a Civil State, or, An Historical Narration of the Dangerous Pernicious Practices and Opinions wherewith Samuel Gorton and his Leveling Accomplices so Much Disturbed and Molested the Several Plantations in New-England Parallel to the Positions and Proceedings of the Present Levellers in Old-England (London, 1649). For a welcome exception to the almost exclusive focus on Gorton’s religious thought, see Michelle Burnham’s insightful reading of Gorton’s politics, which she convincingly connects to the Levellers, in “Samuel Gorton’s Leveller Aesthetics and the Economics of Colonial Dissent,” William and Mary Quarterly 67, no. 3 (2010): 433 –57.

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24. London Metropolitan Archives Ms 4458, vol. 1, St. Stephen’s, Coleman Street, Vestry Minute Book, n.p., see entries for 1645 – 49; John Coffey, John Goodwin (Rochester, NY: Boydell and Brewer, 2006), 124 –27; Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 111–16; Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolutionaries: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 369, 407, 421, 437, 484, 539, 544; E. S. More, “John Goodwin and the Origins of the New Arminianism,” Journal of British Studies 22, no. 1 (1982): 50–70. 25. Edwards, Gangreana, 2:51; Coffey, John Goodwin, 120– 40; William Walwyn, Walwyn’s Just Defense (London, 1649), in J. R. McMichael and Barbara Taft, eds., The Writings of William Walwyn (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 372; More, “John Goodwin and the Origins of the New Arminianism,” 50–70. 26. Edwards, Gangreana, 2:25, 24 –62; Vicars, Coleman Steet Conclave Visited, n.p.; John Goodwin, M.S. to A.S. (London, 1644); Roger Williams, The Bloody Tenet of Persecution (London, 1644); William Walwyn and ( John Goodwin?), The Compassionate Samaritan (London, 1644); Coffey, John Goodwin, 110; John Coffey, “Puritanism and Liberty Revisited: The Case for Toleration in the English Revolution,” Historical Journal 41, no. 4 (1998): 970–71. 27. William Lamont, “Pamphleteering in the English Revolution,” in Gordon J. Schochet with Patricia E. Tatspaugh and Carol Brobeck, eds., Religion, Resistance, and Civil War: Proceedings of the Folger Institute Center for the History of British Political Thought (Washington, DC: Folger Institute, 1993), 190. William Walwyn, The Compassionate Samaritan (London, 1644), in David Wooton, ed., Divine Right and Democracy: An Anthology of Political Writing in Stuart England (London: Penguin, 1988), 248 – 49; William Walwyn, The Power of Love (London, 1643), A3, n.p. For more of Walwyn’s ideas concerning toleration, see A Word in Season (London, 1646) and Michaels and Taft, introduction to Writings of William Walwyn. In his insightful article “Puritanism and Liberty Revisited: The Case for Toleration in the English Revolution,” John Coffey refines J. C. Davis’s overdrawn criticism of the conflation of puritanism with unfettered liberty of conscience, arguing correctly that the English Revolution did produce a coherent campaign for general religious toleration, although only a minority of the godly favored this position. See J. C. Davis, “Religion and the Struggle for Freedom in the English Revolution,” Historical Journal 35, no. 3 (1992): 507–30. 28. For a well-researched view of the Levellers’ emergence that contrasts with mine, see Phil Baker and Elliot Vernon, “What Was the First Agreement of the People?” Historical Journal 53, no. 1 (2010): 39 –59. As Baker and Vernon observe in their article, associating the July 1646 Remonstrance with the “Levellers” is terminologically problematic, since the movement received its name from its critics in November 1647 following the controversy brought on by the first Agreement of the People. Nonetheless, I use it here, for the sake of both convenience and historical clarity, as the programs outlined in the Remonstrance and the Agreement varied very little and were led and supported largely the same people. Furthermore, with the campaign surrounding the Remonstrance, those soon to be called Levellers emerged as a distinct faction among the Independents as the politics of their sometime collaborators in the coalition, such as those from John Goodwin’s gathered church, began moving in more socially cautious directions. 29. For Presbyterian political formation, see Michael Mahony, “Presbyterianism in the City of London, 1645 –1647,” Historical Journal 22, no. 1 (1979): 93 –114; Keith Lindley, Popular Politics and Religion in Civil War London (Aldershot, UK: Scolar, 1997), 356 – 403; Ann Hughes, Gangreana and the Struggle for the English Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991), chap. 5; Michael Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire: A New History of the English Civil Wars (London: Allen Lane, 2008), chap. 16; Peacey, “John Lilburne and the Long Parliament,” 625 – 45. Murray Tolmie discussed the Levellers’ roots in the unstable Independent political coalition of gathered churches in Triumph of the Saints, 144 –84. 30. Norah Carlin, “Leveller Organization in London,” Historical Journal 27, no. 4 (1984):

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959 –60; Keith Lindley, “Whitechapel Independents and the English Revolution,” Historical Journal 41, no. 1 (1998): 283 –91; Wright, “Thomas Lambe,” in DNB Online (2008); Edwards, Gangreana 1:68, 96; 2:29 –30; 3:161. Perhaps due to the unwanted publicity Thomas Edwards afforded his church, Thomas Lambe ended up moving at least some of its meetings from Bell Alley to the Spital in 1646. 31. H. N. Brailsford, The Levellers and the English Revolution, edited and prepared by Christopher Hill (London: Cresset, 1961), 114, 313 –14, 520, 555 –56, 56; Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 145 – 49; John Saltmarsh, Smoke in the Temple (London, 1646), quoted in Joan S. Bennet, Reviving Liberty: Radical Christian Humanism in Milton’s Great Poems (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 101; Pauline Gregg, Free-Born John: A Biography of John Lilburne (London: Harrap, 1961), 116, 124, 229, 230. 32. Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 124; Walwyn, Walwyn’s Just Defense, in McMichael and Taft, eds., Writings of William Walwyn, 352; Edwards, Gangreana, 1:40, 96; John Lilburne, Innocency and Truth Justified (London, 1646), 4 –6; William Prynne, A Fresh Discovery, 17–18; David R. Adams, “The Secret Printing and Publishing Career of Richard Overton the Leveller, 1644 – 46,” Library: The Transactions of the Bibliographical Society 11, no. 1 (2010): 12, table 1; William Walwyn, England’s Lamentable Slavery (London, 1645); John Lilburne, England’s Birthright Justified (London, 1645); A Copie of a Letter, Written by John Lilburne Lt. Col., To Mr William Prynne Esq (London, 1645); The Copy of a Letter from Lieutenant Colonel John Lilburne, to a Friend (London, 1645); Richard Overton, England’s Misery and Remedy (London, 1645), and The Just Man’s Justification (London, 1645); Martin Mar-Priest (Richard Overton), The Arraignment of Mr. Persecution (London, 1645); Martin Mar-Priest, A Sacred Decretall (London, 1645); Martin Mar-Priest, Martin’s Eccho (London, 1645); Martin Mar-Priest, The Ordinance for Tithes Dismounted (London, 1645). 33. Braddick, God’s Fury, England’s Fire, 480–81; Ian Gentles, The New Model Army in England, Scotland, and Ireland, 1645–1653 (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992, 1994), 145 – 47; Mahony, “Presbyterianism in the City of London,” 96 –103; Robert Ashton, Counter-Revolution: The Second Civil War and its Origins, 1646–1648 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 132 –35; Gregg, Free-Born John, 137; Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 150; Walwyn, Word in Season; Lilburne, Just Man’s Justification; [Richard Overton and William Walwyn], A Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens (London, 1646); Brailsford, Levellers and the English Revolution, 96. It’s also possible that the republican MP Henry Marten collaborated with Walwyn and Overton on the Remonstrance; see Brailsford, Levellers and the English Revolution, 138 –39n1. 34. Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 149 –52; Derek Benjamin Heater, Citizenship in Britain: A History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 33; William Haller and Godfrey Davies, eds., The Leveller Tracts: 1647–1653 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), 30; Overton and Walwyn, Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens, 3, 6, 8, 9, 10. 35. Overton and Walwyn, Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens, 4 –7, 9, 14, 19 –20. 36. Ibid., 12, 14, 15, 17. 37. Ibid., 16. 38. For the importance of practical Christianity in Leveller political thought, see Scott, England’s Troubles, especially chap. 11; J. Colin Davis, “The Levellers and Christianity,” in Peter Gaunt, ed., The English Civil War: The Essential Readings (London: Blackwell, 2000), 279 –303; Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon, “‘Whatsoever Yee Would That Men Should Doe Unto You, Even So Doe Yee to Them’: An Analysis of the Effect of Religious Consciousness on the Origins of the Leveller Movement,” Historian 65:2003. Grob-Fitzgibbon unfortunately constructs a false dichotomy between Leveller religious convictions and their political efforts. 39. John Lilburne, The Free Man’s Freedom Vindicated (London, 1645), in Don Wolfe, ed., The Leveller Manifestos of the Puritan Revolution (New York: Humanities, 1967), 317; Richard Overton, An Arrow Against All Tyrants (London, 1646), 5; A Defiance Against All Arbitrary Usurpations

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(London, 1646), 2; Vox Plebis, or the People’s Outcry Against Oppression, Injustice, and Tyranny (London, 1646), 2. For more on the Leveller concept of equity, see Mark Fortier, The Culture of Equity in Early Modern England (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005), 173 –74. Authorship of Vox Plebis has been variously attributed to John Wildman, Richard Overton, and Marchmont Nedham. For a discussion favoring Nedham, see Scott, Commonwealth Principles, 83, 84, and n102. 40. Vox Plebis, 4; Overton, Defiance Against All Arbitrary Usurpations, 2, 5, 26; Arrow Against All Tyrants, 5; Lilburne, Free Man’s Freedom Vindicated, 317. 41. Vox Plebis, 1, 4; Overton, Defiance Against All Arbitrary Usurpations, 2, 26; Christopher Hill, Antichrist in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 168; John Lilburne, Liberty Vindicated Against Slavery (London, 1646), 3, 8, 28. 42. William Walwyn, The Vanity of the Present Churches (London, 1649), 43. Also quoted in Scott, England’s Troubles, 253 –54. 43. William Walwyn, Walwyn’s Just Defense (1649), 4 –5; Gold Tried in the Fire, or the Burnt Petitions Revived (London, 1647), preface, n.p.; “An Appeal to Parliament from the Large Petition of the Levellers,” in Woodhouse, ed., Puritanism and Liberty, 318 –22; Gregg, Free-Born John, 116; Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 151–54. Tew was imprisoned for these remarks, which precipitated yet another round of Leveller petitioning. 44. John Wildman, A Call to the Soldiers of the Army (London, 1647), 7; An Apology of the Soldiers (London, 1647); Michael A. Norris, “Edward Sexby, John Reynolds, and Edmund Chillenden: Agitators, ‘Sectarian Grandees,’ and the Relations of the New Model Army with London in the Spring of 1647,” Historical Research 76, no. 1 (2003): 30–53; A Solemn Engagement of the Army (London, 1647), in Woodhouse, ed., Puritanism and Liberty, 401. 45. Wildman, Call to the Soldiers, 7; Woodhouse, introduction to Puritanism and Liberty, 18, 21–23; Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 145 –62; Norris, “Edward Sexby, John Reynolds, and Edmund Chillenden,” 30–53. For lists of agitators by regiment, see appendix D in C. H. Firth, ed., The Clarke Papers, 4 vols. (London: Camden Society, 1891), 1:435 – 40. 46. Ian Gentles, “The Agreements of the People and Their Political Contexts, 1647–1649,” in Mendle, ed., Putney Debates of 1647, 149; “A Representation of the Army,” in Woodhouse, ed., Puritanism and Liberty, 403 –9. For an expanded treatment of military labor power as a source of political sovereignty, see Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger, 231–57. For the soldiers’ organizing against the specter of a large standing army, see Morrill, “The Army Revolt of 1647,” in The Nature of the English Revolution: Essays by John Morrill (London: Longmans, 1993), 307–31. 47. Morrill and Baker, “The Case of the Armie Truly Re-Stated,” in Mendle, ed., Putney Debates, 103 –25; Gentles, “Agreements of the People and Their Political Contexts,” 148 –74; Baker and Vernon, “What Was the First Agreement of the People?” 39 –59. My argument here reflects a respectful engagement with the important contributions of Morrill, Baker, Gentles, Woolwrych, and Vernon. Their work has added much to our knowledge of army politics while reinforcing an older argument of Christopher Hill’s that the New Model Army soldiers organized themselves around a constellation of radical political ideas. Besides The Case of the Army Truly Stated, the agenda set out in the first Agreement of the People also drew on the Remonstrance of Many Thousands and Overton’s July Appeal from the Degenerate Representative (London, 1647), 31–38. 48. Gentles, “Agreements of the People,” 149 –51; “The Putney Debates,” in Woodhouse, ed., Puritanism and Liberty, 49, 54 –55. For a human history of the soldiers’ experience in the civil wars, one that increases our understanding of what they had in mind when they alluded to the blood sacrifice of their military labors, see Barbara Donagan’s impressive War in England, 1642–1649 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), especially the section titled “The Texture of War: The Soldier’s World,” 65 –126. 49. “The Putney Debates,” 66 –67. Austin Woolrych believes that the grandees ordered William Clarke, who kept the running record of the debate, to strike from the official transcript a vote of the assembled at Putney to expand the franchise to beggars and servants. See his Soldiers

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and Statesmen: The General Council of the Army and its Debates, 1647–1648 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 243 – 44, 257. The subject of military honor receives skillful handling in Barbara Donagan’s “The Web of Honour: Soldiers, Christians, and Gentlemen in the English Civil War,” Historical Journal 44, no. 2 (2001)” 365 –89. For a more general treatment of how conceptions of property intersected with revolutionary politics, see the chapter “Liberty and Property: The People and the Political Nation in the English Revolution,” in David Underdown, A Freeborn People: Politics and the Nation in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996). 50. “The Putney Debates,” 43 – 45, 53 –55, 66 –67, 70–71. For the officers’ council amendments to the Agreement, see Summary of the Reports of the Committee on the Army’s Papers and the Agreement of the People, in Woodhouse, ed., Puritanism and Liberty, 451. There was a tradition of mutiny against impressments in the New Model Army, a practice that supplied about half of the soldiers for the ranks of the infantry. For work on impressment during the English Revolution, see Gentles, New Model Army, 31–32, and “Why Men Fought in the British Civil Wars,” History Teacher 26, no. 4 (1993); Brailsford, Levellers and the English Revolution, 14, 143, 147, 101, 299, 352, 462, 530. 51. Joseph Frank, The Levellers: A History of the Writings of Three Seventeenth Century Social Democrats, John Lilburne, Richard Overton, William Walwyn (London: Cambridge University Press, 1955), 283; Tolmie, Triumph of the Saints, 166 –70; Wright, “Jeremiah Ives, fl. 1646 – 1674,” in DNB Online (2008); Gentles, “Agreements of the People,” 155; Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger, 246 –52; John Saltmarsh, A Letter from the Army (London, 1647), and England’s Friend Raised from the Grave (London, 1649). 52. Brailsford, Levellers and the English Revolution, 303, 323; David Underdown, Pride’s Purge: Politics in the English Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971); P. G. Rogers, The Fifth Monarchy Men (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 97, 102 –3; Frank, Levellers, 172; Gregg, Free-Born John, 251; Ian Gentles, “The Struggle for London in the Second Civil War,” Historical Journal 26, no.2 (1983): 277–305. The meeting date of November 15 was not without symbolic significance, as it marked the first anniversary of the Leveller Mutiny at Corkbush Field in Herefordshire. 53. Andrew Sharp, “The Levellers and the Execution of Charles I,” in Jason Peacey, ed., The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 191; John Lilburne, Legal Fundamental Liberties (London, 1649), in Woodhouse, ed., Puritanism and Liberty, 343; “The Whitehall Debates,” in ibid., 125 –78.

chapter six 1. John Milton, Paradise Lost and Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Northrop Frye (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1967), 289. 2. Bernard Capp, Cromwell’s Navy: The Fleet and the English Revolution 1648–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 87; Frances Henderson, ed., The Clarke Papers: Further Selections from the Papers of William Clarke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 5:190, 203, 205, 228; C. H. Firth, ed., The Narrative of General Venables (London: Royal Historical Society, 1900), xxii (hereafter Venables Narrative); Henry Whistler’s journal (1654 –55), British Library, Sloane Mss 3926 f. 2; Francis Barrington, letter from Jamaica ( July 14, 1655), British Library Egerton Mss 2648 f. 245. 3. Venables Narrative, xxvi, appendix E, 144 – 45; British Library, Sloane Mss 3926 fols. 3, 6; British Library Egerton Mss 2648 f. 245; I.S., A Brief and Perfect Journal of the Late Proceedings and Success of the English Army in the West Indies, cont’d until June 1655 (London, 1655), 10–11. 4. Venables Narrative, 20, 28, 34, 45, appendix B, 116 –22, appendix E, 156; I.S., A Brief and Perfect Journal, 6, 16, 24; Carla Gardina Pestana, “English Character and the Fiasco of the

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Western Design,” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 3 no. (2005): 5; Bodleian Library Rawlinson Mss A 36 fos. 368, 374 –376; 37 fol. 31–32; 53 fol. 284. 5. For scholarship on the revolutionary birth of the English empire, see Carla Gardina Pestana’s The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2004), 157–228; David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 125 – 45; Robert M. Bliss, Revolution and Empire: English Politics and the American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990); Alison Games, Web of Empire: English Cosmopolitans in an Age of Expansion, 1560–1660 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). Games argues that the republic’s conquest of Ireland represented an important transition in the history of English empire building, marking a shift from a commercial orientation to one more focused on plantation settlement (287). As Patrick Griffin points out in a very helpful review of Web of Empire, Games insightfully complicates and expands upon earlier arguments made in the same vein by David Beers Quinn, The Elizabethans and the Irish (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966); Nicholas P. Canny, “The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America,” William and Mary Quarterly 30, no. 4 (1973): 575 –98, and Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Karen Ordahl Kupperman, The Jamestown Project (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Peter C. Mancall, Hakluyt’s Promise: An Elizabethan’s Obsession for an English America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). For Griffin’s review, see William and Mary Quarterly 66, no. 3 (2009): 632 –36. I would argue that within the 1649 –55 period, the Act of 1650, the Navigation Act (1651), the conquest of Ireland (1649 –52), and the Western Design (1654 –55) signaled a partial realization of a long-held imperial vision that stretched back to the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, one that foresaw global commerce uniting an English plantation empire in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean regions. 6. R. L. Greaves, “Isaac Pennington,” in Richard Greaves and Robert Zaller, eds., Biographical Dictionary of British Radicals in the Seventeenth Century, 3 vols. (Brighton, UK: Harvester, 1982), 3:21–22; R. K. G. Temple, “Owen Roe,” in ibid., 3:116 –18; Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 546 – 49; John Goodwin, Right and Might Well Met (London, 1649), and Eikon Basilike (London, 1649); John Milton, Eikonklastes (London, 1649); Janelle Greenberg, The Radical Face of the Ancient Constitution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 230–36. Richard Saltonstall Sr., Owen Rowe, Daniel Taylor, and Nathaniel Lacy of Coleman Street Ward also received appointments as judges on the newly constituted High Court of Justice, where Maurice Thomson would serve as well. See Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 549. For the history of the regicide, see Moss Tubb, “Printing the Regicide of Charles I,” History 89, no. 296 (2004): 500–524; Sean Kelsey, “The Trial of Charles I,” English Historical Review 118, no. 477 (2003): 583 –616; Clive Holmes, “The Trial and Execution of Charles I,” Historical Journal 53, no. 2 (2010): 289 –316. 7. Bodleian Library, Ms Eng C 6075 f.155/1. My thanks to Michael Webb for bringing this document to my attention and for speculative discussions about the identity of the speaker. Mr. Webb, an archivist at the Bodleian Library, suggested Thomas Fairfax as a possible alternative to my identification of Vane. 8. Henry Vane, The Retired Man’s Meditations (London, 1655), and A Healing Question (London, 1656); Antonia Fraser, Cromwell (New York: Grove, 1973), 291, Cromwell quoted on 282; “Act Abolishing the Office of King,” in S. R. Gardiner, ed., The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1620–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1906), 384; Jason Peacey, The Regicides and the Execution of Charles I (New York: Palgrave, 2001). 9. Blair Worden, The Rump Parliament, 1648–1653 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 189 –97, quote on 191; Oliver Cromwell, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, ed. W. C. Abbott, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 2:36 –39. To sort out

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the complicated military arrangements in Ireland during the 1640s, see Robert Armstrong, Protestant War: The “British” of Ireland and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005); James Scott Wheeler, “Four Armies in Ireland,” in Jane H. Ohlmeyer, ed., Ireland from Independence to Occupation, 1641–1660 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 42 –65. 10. Willy Maley, “Milton and ‘the Complication of Interests’ in Early Modern Ireland,” in Balachandra Rajan and Elizabeth Sauer, eds., Milton and the Imperial Vision (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1999), 162 –64; Micheál Ó Siochrú, “The Duke of Lorraine and the International Struggle for Ireland, 1649 –1653,” Historical Journal 48, no. 4 (2005): 909 –10; K. S. Bottigheimer, English Money and Irish Land: The Adventurers in the Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971); Nicholas Canny, Kingdom and Colony: Ireland and the Atlantic World, 1560–1800 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 102 –16; Prendergast, Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland, 239 – 45; Keith Lindley, “Irish Adventurers and Godly Militants in the 1640s,” Irish Historical Studies 29, no. 113 (1994): 1–12; Cromwell, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, 2:38 –39. 11. Folger Library Ms x.d. 483 f. 148; Chris Durston, “‘Let Ireland be Quiet’: Opposition in England to the Cromwellian Conquest of Ireland,” History Workshop Journal 21 (1986): 105 –11; Norah Carlin, “The Levellers and the Conquest of Ireland in 1649,” Historical Journal 30, no. 2 (1987): 271–73, and “Extreme or Mainstream? The English Independents and the Cromwellian Reconquest of Ireland, 1649 –1651,” in Brendan Bradshaw, Andrew Hadfield, and Willy Maley, eds., Representing Ireland: Literature and the Origins of Conflict,1534–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 210–13; Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Slaves, Sailors, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon, 2000), 121; The Levellers (Falsely So-Called) Vindicated (London, 1649), 6. Women Leveller petition quoted in Patricia Crawford, “‘The Poorest She’: Women and Citizenship in Early Modern England,” in Michael Mendle, ed., The Putney Debates of 1647: The Army, the Levellers, and the English State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 210. For more on women petitioners, see Ann Hughes, “Gender and Politics in Leveller Literature,” in Susan Amussen and Mark Kishlinsky, Political Culture and Cultural Politics in England: Essays Presented to David Underdown (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 162 –88. 12. The Soldier’s Demand, n.p; The Levellers [Falsely So-Called] Vindicated, 2 –6; James Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution (New York: Verso, 2000), 254; Ian Gentles, The New Model Army in England, Scotland, and Ireland, 1645–1653 (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992, 1994), 326 –29, and “Political Funerals during the English Revolution,” in Stephen Porter, ed., London and the Civil War (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996), 218 –20. 13. Durston, “Let Ireland be Quiet,” 105 –11; Pauline Gregg, Free-Born John: A Biography of John Lilburne (London: Harrap, 1961), 278 –84; The Levellers (Falsely So-Called) Vindicated, 7; Charles Firth and Godfrey Davies, The Regimental History of Cromwell’s Army, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1940), 1:182 –84; Henry Denne, The Levellers Design Discovered: or, the Anatomie of the Late Unhappy Mutiny Presented Unto the Soldiery of the Army (London, 1649); G. E. Aylmer, The Levellers in the English Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 44 – 45; Richard Greaves, “Wentworth Day,” in Greaves and Zaller, eds., Biographical Dictionary of British Radicals in the Seventeenth Century, 1:217; Hardress Waller to unknown correspondent, May 29, 1649, Folger Mss x.d. 483 f. 38. The motto on Day’s standard actually appeared in Latin as Salus Populi Suprema Lex. 14. Micheál O Siochrú, God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland (London: Faber and Faber, 2008), 57–63; Jane H. Ohlmeyer, Civil War and Restoration in the Three Stuart Kingdoms: The Career of Randal MacDonnell, Marquis of Antrim 1609–1683 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Raymond Gillespie, “Owen Rowe O’Neill, c. 1582 –1649: Soldier and Politician,” in G. O’Brien and P. Roebuck, eds., Nine Ulster Lives (Belfast: Ulster

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Historical Foundation, 1992), 149 –68; Jerrold I. Casway, Owen Roe O’Neill and the Struggle for Catholic Ireland (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), 238 –39, 243 – 44; Thomas L. Coonan, The Irish Catholic Confederacy and Puritan Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954), 282 –83; Robert Dunlop, Ireland under the Commonwealth: Being a Selection of Documents Relating to the Government of Ireland from 1651 to 1659, 2 vols. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1913), 1:244n1; C. H. Firth, ed., The Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow, Lieutenant-General of the Horse in the Army of the Commonwealth of England, 1625–1672, 2 vols. (London: Clarendon, 1894), 1:228. 15. Trinity College Ms 672 fos. 43 –83; Vincent Carey, “John Derricke’s Image of Ireland, Sir Henry Sidney and the Massacre at Mullaghmast, 1578,” Irish Historical Studies 31, no. 123 (1999): 305 –27; Jane H. Ohlmeyer, “‘Civilizing Those Rude Parts’: Colonization within Britain and Ireland, 1580–1640s,” in Nicholas Canny, ed., The Origins of Empire, vol. 1 of The Oxford History of the British Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, 2001), 124 – 47; Raymond Gillespie, Colonial East Ulster: The Settlement of Ulster, 1600–1641 (Cork, UK: Cork University Press, 1985); Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580–1640 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 121–301; David Dickson, Old World Colony: Cork and South Munster, 1630–1830 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 3 –29; Robert Pentland Mahaffy, ed., Calendar of State Papers Relating to Ireland, 1633–1647 (London, 1901), 354, 357; Ó Siochrú, God’s Executioner, 42 – 44, quote on 43, and “Atrocity, Codes of Conduct and the Irish in the British Civil Wars 1641–1653,” Past and Present, no. 195 (2007): 55 –86. 16. Ó Siochrú, God’s Executioner, 82 –95, Ormonde quoted on 94 –95; “Atrocity, Codes of Conduct and the Irish in the British Civil Wars 1641–1653,” 77; Cromwell, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, 2:124 –25; Letters from Ireland, Relating the Several Great Successes It Hath Pleased God to Give unto the Parliaments Forces There in the Taking of Drogheda, Trym, Dundalk, Carlingford, and the Nury (London, 1649); Philip Herbert Hore, History of the Town and County of Wexford, 6 vols. (London, 1906), 5:293 –304. The work of Ó Siochrú cited above as well as Jason McElligott’s in “Cromwell, Drogheda, and the Abuse of Irish History,” Bullan: An Irish Studies Review 6, no. 1, (2001): 109 –32 has convincingly debunked Tom Reilly’s highly publicized and overwrought attempt to exonerate Cromwell’s conduct at Drogheda in Cromwell: An Honourable Enemy (Dingle, UK: Brandon Books, 1999). 17. John Morrill, “The Drogheda Massacre in Cromwellian Context,” in David Edwards, Padraig Lenihan, and Clodagh Tait, eds., Age of Atrocity: Violence and Political Conflict in Early Modern Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts, 2007); Geoffrey Parker, Empire, War and Faith in Early Modern Europe (London: Allen Lane, 2003), chap. 6; Barbara Donagan, “Codes and Conduct in the English Civil War,” Past and Present, no. 118 (1988): 65 –95. 18. C. H. Firth and G. Davies, The Regimental History of Cromwell’s Army (Oxford: Clarendon, 1940) , 2:579; Alan B. Hinds, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Venetian, 1647–1652 (London, 1927), 224; Ó Siochrú, “Atrocity, Codes of Conduct and the Irish in the British Civil Wars 1641–1653,” 82; Irish Commissioners to Committee of Revenue at Wexford, April 4, 1653, in Dunlop, ed., Ireland under the Commonwealth, 1:5 –7, 329; Richard Davenport to Hugh Peter, July 17, 1637, and Hugh Peter to John Winthrop, July 16, 1637, in Allyn Bailey Forbes, ed., Winthrop Papers, vol. 3, 1631–1637 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1943), 450, 453. For more on George Cooke’s Atlantic circuit of conquest, see Games’s illuminating analysis in Web of Empire, chap. 8. 19. Commissioners to the Council of State, July 22, 1652, in Dunlop, ed., Ireland under the Commonwealth, 1:239; Commissioners to Parliament, May 5 1652, in ibid., 1:179; May 12, 1653, Prendergast Papers, Kings Inns Library, Dublin, 15 vols., 1:135; Ó Siochrú, “Atrocity, Codes of Conduct and the Irish in the British Civil Wars 1641–1653,” 80; Pa’draig Lenihan, “War and Population, 1649 –52,” Irish Economic and Social History 24 (1997): 18 –21; Charles Carlton, “The Impact of the Fighting,” in John Morrill, ed., The Impact of the English Civil War (London: Collins and Brown, 1991), 20. For the English starvation policy, see documents of July 1, 1651, in Dun-

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lop, ed., Ireland under the Commonwealth, 1:9; February 20, 1652, 1:138; March 1, 1652, 1:143; March 22, 1652, 1:147; September 8, 1652, 1:42; Prendergast Papers, January 1653, 1:45; May 7, 1656, 1:553; July 1, 1656, 1:540; December 1, 1656, 1:588. 20. Sean Kelsey, Inventing a Republic: The Political Culture of the English Commonwealth, 1649–1659 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 56; Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra, 121; Marcellus Rivers and Oxenbridge Foyle, England’s Slavery or Barbados Merchandize (London, 1659). 21. Steve Hindle, “Dearth and the English Revolution: The Harvest Crisis of 1647–50,” Economic History Review 61, no. 1 (2008): 65 –68, 70, 74; W. G. Hoskins, “Harvest Fluctuations and English Economic History, 1620–1759,” Agricultural History Review 16, no. 1 (1968): 18; The Mournful Cries of Many Thousand Tradesmen (London, 1649), n.p. 22. John Lilburne, England’s New Chains Discovered (London, 1649), 7; Lord Mayor’s Ordinance for Beggars, March 1649 (Wing catalogue, 2nd ed., L2882L); Ordinance of the House of Lords, March 4, 1647 (Wing, 2nd ed., E2816); John Lilburne, The Picture of the Counsel of State (London, 1649). 23. William Walwyn, The Vanity of the Present Churches (London, 1649), 23 –26, 39, 41. 24. The Second Part of England’s New Chains Discovered (London, 1649); The Humble Petition and Representation of Several Churches of God in London Commonly (Though Falsely) Called Anabaptists (London, 1649), 5 –8. Signs had appeared earlier that the gathered church leaders were ready to desert the Levellers in return for liberty of conscience. See A Declaration by Congregational Societies in and about the City of London (London, 1647); John Price, Walwyn’s Wiles or The Manifestors Manifested (London, 1649), epistle, 7, 9, 10, 13, 14. 25. William Walwyn, Walwyn’s Just Defense (London, 1649), 23, 24, 28 –33, and The Bloody Project (London, 1648), in J. R. McMichael and Barbara Taft, eds., The Writings of William Walwyn (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 297, 306. 26. Daniel Taylor, Certain Queries or Consideration . . . to . . . all that Desire Reformation of Grievances (London, 1651), 7–8, 11–15, 18 –19. My study of the St. Stephen’s parish under church warden accounts in the London Metropolitan Archives (Ms. 4457 vol. 3 [1656 –1685], n.p.) reveals the following for distributions for the poor: March 1656 –November 1657 (£118.07.06); 1658 (£117.01.02); 1659 (£120.14.04), for a total of £355.12.12. Measured against the £3,537 worth of shares in the Irish Adventurers joint stock company that parishioner William Spurstowe purchased between July 1653 and May 1654, the charitable outlay from St. Stephen’s does not seem very impressive, especially since it was one of London’s wealthiest parishes. I have no figures for how the St. Stephen’s distribution might compare to the poor relief performed by other London parishes. For the Spurstowe statistics, see Robert Pentland Mahaffy, ed., Calendar of the State Papers Relating to Ireland Preserved in the Public Record Office: Adventurers for Land, 1642–1659 (London, 1903), 63, hereafter CSPI 1642–1659. 27. The manufacturing, retail, and continental and colonial commercial interests of these saints can be traced in Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 183 –95, tables 4.1, 4.2, 4.3; J. E. Farnell, “The Navigation Act of 1651, the First Dutch War, and the London Merchant Community,” Economic History Review 16, no. 3 (1964): 443 – 46. For Noell in particular, see Russell Menard, Sweet Negotiations: Sugar, Slavery, and Plantation Agriculture in Early Barbados (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), xii–xiii. For more on how merchant networks coordinated private and public enterprise, see David Hancock, “The British Atlantic World: Co-ordination, Complexity, and the Emergence of an Atlantic Market Economy, 1651–1815,” Itinerario 2, no. 3 (1999): 107–26, and “A World of Business to Do: William Freeman and the Foundations of England’s Commercial Empire, 1645 –1707,” William and Mary Quarterly 57, no. 1 (2000): 3 –34. 28. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 484, 512 –13; James E. Farnell, “The Usurpation of Honest London Householders: Barebone’s Parliament,” English Historical Review 82, no. 322 (1967): 24 –29; Hinds, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Venetian, 1647–1652, 187–88.

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29. Pestana, English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 183, 186; Menard, Sweet Negotiations; British Library Egerton Mss 2395 fols. 228 –29: Leo Francis Stock, ed., Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments Respecting North America, 5 vols. (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institute of Washington, 1924), 1:185, 186, 209 –11, 222; W. Noel Sainsbury, ed., Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and West Indies, 1574–1660 (London, 1860), 443 – 47; Peter Wilson Coldham, Emigrants in Chains: A Social History of Forced Emigration to the Americas of Felons, Destitute Children, Political and Religious Non-conformists, Vagabonds, Beggars and Other Undesirables, 1607–1776 (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1992), 50; Hilary McD. Beckles, White Servitude and Black Slavery in Barbados, 1627–1715 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), 46, 56; Charles Maclean Andrews, British Committees, Commissions, and Councils of Trade and Plantations, 1622–1675 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1908), 40– 45. Interestingly, Daniel Taylor did not recommend transportation, urging instead corporal punishment and then labor in workhouses for felons to make restitution for their crimes. 30. Bodleian Library Rawlinson Mss A 37 f. 97; 57 f. 8 –13; W. Noel Sainsbury, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, 1574–1660 (London, 1860), 348, 362, 404, 421, 423, 425 – 427, 432, 433, 441, 443, 445, 446, 452, 463, hereafter cited as CSPC 1574–1660; Pestana, English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 168, 189; Stock, ed., Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments Respecting North America, 175 –76; Charles Wilson, England’s Apprenticeship, 1603–1763 (London: Longman, 1984), 58, 130–32; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 163, 175 –76, 192, 194, 514, 556, 589. 31. Brenner, Merchants and Revolutionaries, 555 –56; Michael Jarvis, “Owen Rowe, 1593 – 1661,” in Lawrence Goldsman, ed., Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; online ed. 2008), hereafter DNB Online (2008); Kenneth G. C. Newport in ibid.; Bernard Capp, Cromwell’s Navy: The Fleet and the English Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 50; Violet Rowe, Sir Henry Vane the Younger: A Study in Military and Political History (London: Athlone, 1970), 170–71; C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait, Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 2 vols. (London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1911), 2:75. 32. Christopher Hill, The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries (London: Faber and Faber, 1984). 33. Irish Commissioners to Henry Vane, August 2, 1651, in Dunlop, ed., Ireland under the Commonwealth, 1:22; Austin Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), 305; S. R. Gardiner, “The Transplantation to Connaught,” English Historical Review 14, no. 56 (1899): 700–734; Ó Siochrú, God’s Executioner, 226 –30; John Morrill, “Cromwell, Parliament, Ireland and a Commonwealth in Crisis: 1652 Revisited,” Parliamentary History 30, no. 2 (2011): 193 –214; John Cunningham, “Oliver Cromwell and the ‘Cromwellian’ Settlement of Ireland,” Historical Journal 53 no. 4 (2010): 919 –37. 34. Dunlop, ed., Ireland under the Commonwealth, 1:338 –39, 355, 489 –90, 544; CSPI 1642–1659, 63, 382; Calendar of State Papers Relating to Ireland Preserved in the Public Record Office, 1647–1660, Addenda 1625–1660 (London, 1903), 437, 447, 459, 461, 462, 494, 503, 509, 518, 519, 559; S. J. Connolly, Divided Kingdom: Ireland 1630–1800 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 108 –11; T. C. Barnard, Cromwellian Ireland: English Government and Reform in Ireland, 1649–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975, 2000), 34, 35, 59; CSPC 1547–1660, 441; Andrews, British Committees, Commissions, and Councils for Trade and Plantation, 49 –51; Hore, History of the Town and County of Wexford, 323 –24. 35. Pestana, English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 86, 115, 116; Bliss, Revolution and Empire, 86 –89; Larry Gragg, Englishmen Transplanted: The English Colonization of Barbados, 1627–1660 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 47– 48; April Lee Hatfield, Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 192; Valerie Pearl, The Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution in London:

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Government and National Politics, 1626–1643 (New York: Oxford University Press,1961), 324; CSPC 1574–1660, 405. 36. Nicholas Foster, A Brief Relation of the Late Horrid Rebellion Acted in the Island of Barbados (London, 1650); The Humble Petition of the Merchants and Planters Adventuring to the Island of Barbados in Stock, ed., Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments Respecting North America, 1:188 –89; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 587–92; Pestana, English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 98 –99; Gragg, Englishmen Transplanted, 48 – 49; Vincent T. Harlow, A History of Barbados, 1625–1685 (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1926, 1969), 55 –64. For the “low-grade warfare” endemic in Atlantic slave societies, see Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 37. Firth and Rait, eds., Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 2:425 –29; Stock, ed., Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments Respecting North America, 1:218; Bliss, Revolution and Empire, 61–62, 89 –90; Pestana, English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 99 –102. 38. Stock, ed., Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments Respecting North America, 1:219, 226 –29; for reprints of Ayescue’s reports from Barbados to the Council of State, see Darnell Davis, The Cavaliers and Roundheads of Barbados, 1650–1652 (Georgetown, British Guiana, 1887), chaps. 12 and 13; CSPC 1574–1660, 370–75; George F. Steckley, ed., The Letters of John Paige, London Merchant, 1648–1658 (London: London Record Society, 1984), 57–82; Harlow, History of Barbados, 67–80; Gragg, Englishmen Transplanted, 49 –51; Michael Craton, Empire, Enslavement, and Freedom in the Caribbean (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 1997), 80–82. For more on the problem of bringing colonists to heel under imperial rule, see Jack P. Greene, “Negotiated Authorities. The Problem of Governance in the Extended Polities of the Early Modern Atlantic World,” in his Negotiated Authorities. Essays in Colonial Political and Constitutional History (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1994), 1–24. 39. Stock, ed., Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments Respecting North America, 1:230–31; Bliss, Revolution and Empire, 89; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 595 –97; Pestana, English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 115 –17; Richard Morton, Colonial Virginia: The Tidewater Period, 1607–1710 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960), 125, 165 –67. 40. Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra, 145 – 47; Farnell, “Navigation Act of 1651, the First Dutch War, and the London Merchant Community,” 439 –54. For the argument that the Navigation Acts had more to do with English Continental diplomacy than with imperial expansion across the Atlantic, see Stephen Pincus, Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650–1658 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 40–50. Levellers also advocated “free trade” because it helped small producers and wore away at the royal prerogative. See, for instance, see John Lilburne, The Charters of London, or the Second Part of London’s Liberty in Chains Discovered (London, 1646). For more scholarship on seventeenth-century notions of free trade, see Christian J. Koot, “A ‘Dangerous Principle’: Free Trade Discourses in Barbados and the English Leeward Islands, 1650–1689,” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 5, no. 1 (2007): 132 –63; Thomas Leng, “Commercial Conflict and Regulation in the Discourse of Trade in Seventeenth-Century England,” Historical Journal 48, no. 4 (2005): 933 –54; Pestana, English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 159 –74; David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (New York: Cambridge, 2000), 100–124. 41. Larry Gragg, “‘To Procure Negros’: The English Slave Trade to Barbados, 1627–1660,” Slavery and Abolition 16, no. 1 (1995): 65 –84; Margaret Makepeace, “English Traders on the Guinea Coast, 1657–1688: An Analysis of the East India Company Archive,” History in Africa 16 (1989): 237–84; John C. Appleby, “A Guinea Venture, c. 1657: A Note on the Early English Slave Trade,” Mariner’s Mirror 79, no. 1 (1993): 84 –87; Beckles, White Servitude and Black Slavery in Barbados, 260, 389; Stock, Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments Respecting North America, 1:121–23; CSPC 1574–1660, 331, 339; Elizabeth Donnan, ed., Documents Illustrative of the

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History of the Slave Trade to America, 1441–1700 (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1930), 1:126 –34; Russell Menard, “Plantation Empire: Slavery, Plantation Agriculture, and the British Empire in America,” in John Donoghue and Evelyn Jennings, eds., Building the Atlantic Empires: The State, Unfree Labor, and the Rise of Global Capitalism, 1500–1945 (Leiden: Brill, 2014). 42. Steckley, ed., Letters of John Paige, June 1, 1654; Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (London, 1657), 57; extracts from the Minute Book of the Council of Barbados, 1655 –60, in Aubrey Gwnn, ed., “Documents Relating to the Irish in the West Indies,” Analecta Hibernica, Including the Reports of the Irish Manuscripts Commission 4 (1932): 233 – 40; Hilary McD. Beckles, “‘A Riotous and Unruly Lot’: Irish Indentured Servants and Freemen in the English West Indies, 1644 –1713,” William and Mary Quarterly 47, no. 4 (1990): 503 –22; Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra, 124. 43. Scholars are still debating the extent to which colonial and commercial interests figured in the decisions that culminated in the first Anglo-Dutch War; it remains indisputable, however, that England’s insistence upon keeping its colonies free from Dutch trade (to keep profits flowing within the Anglo Atlantic) brought the two republics closer to war; through their victory in the conflict, the English were able to force the Dutch to accept the terms of the Navigation Act, which the Rump had used partially as a negotiating ploy in the prelude to the war. In practice, however, Dutch merchants continued to trade at a brisk pace in the English Atlantic. For the argument that apocalyptic ideology over and above commercial interests motivated the English war effort, see Stephen Pincus, Protestantism and Patriotism: Ideologies and the Making of English Foreign Policy, 1650–1688 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). For a criticism of Pincus’s argument that emphasizes the commercial dimensions of the war, see Jonathan Israel, “England, the Dutch Republic, and Europe in the Seventeenth Century,” Historical Journal 4, no. 2 (1997): 117–21. 44. Scot quoted in Worden, Rump Parliament, 330–31; David M. Loades, England’s Maritime Empire: Seapower, Commerce, and Policy, 1490–1690 (New York: Longman, 2000), 166 –87; Bernard Capp, “Nehemiah Bourne, 1611–1691,” in DNB Online (2008); Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 555; Estelle F. Feinstein, “Edward Hopkins, 1600–1658,” in American National Biography, online ed. (2000); Susan Hardman Moore, Pilgrims: New World Settlers and the Call of Home (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 114. 45. Violet Ann Rowe, Sir Henry Vane the Younger: A Study in Political and Administrative History (London: Athlone, 1970), 158 –190; Capp, Cromwell’s Navy, 27, 123 –31. 46. Mary Anne Everett Greene, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Domestic: Interregnum, 1652–1653 (London, 1878), 565, and Calendar of State Papers, Domestic: Interregnum, 1653–1654 (London, 1879), 219; Capp, Cromwell’s Navy, 58, 258 –59. In England’s “republican” navy, captains had absolute power, and any infractions would meet with horrific punishments, including flogging, time in the bilboes, or “keelhauling,” i.e. being dragged under the keel of the ship from yardarm to yardarm. The philosophers of the maritime state, however, considered these forms of labor discipline “seasonable and moderate.” See, for instance, “The Necessitie for Maintenance of the Shipping of the Kingdom” in the Bodleian Library, Rawlinson Ms A 192 f01.341. 47. Adamson and Folland, Sir Harry Vane, 317; Worden, Rump Parliament, 336; Cromwell, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, 2:638, 641– 44. 48. Bernard Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men: A Study in Seventeenth-Century English Millenarianism (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), 62 –68; “A Declaration of the English Army Now in Scotland, August 1, 1650,” in A. S. P. Woodhouse, ed., Puritanism and Liberty: Being the Army Debates (1647–1649) from the Clarke Manuscripts with Supplementary Documents (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1974), 475; John Rogers, Sagrir, or Doomesday Drawing Nigh (London, 1653), epistle “to the reader,” n.p. 49. For the Mosaic Code in New England, see chap. 4, pp. 129 –30, 138 –39; David Lovejoy,

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Religious Enthusiasm in the New World: Heresy to Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985) ,99 –103; Henry Oswald Aspinwall, The Aspinwall and Aspinwall Families of Lancashire Ad 1189–1923 (Exeter, UK: Wm Pollard, 1923), 13 –14; William Aspinwall, A Brief Description of the Fifth Monarchy (London, 1653). Chapman also sold Thomas Goodwin’s A Sermon of the Fifth Monarchy, Proving by Invincible Arguments that the Saints Shall Have a Kingdom Here on Earth . . . After the Fourth Monarchy is Destroy’d by the Sword of the Saints (London, 1654); Capp, Fifth Monarchy Men, 20–22. 50. Cromwell, Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, 3:61, 63 –64; Samuel Chidley, Retsah a Cry against a Crying Sin (London, 1652), 16 –17; Toby Barnard, The English Republic, 1649–1660 (London: Longman, 1982, 1997), 24 –34; Austin Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 159, 163, 215, 219, 268, 292 –98, 299, 343 – 48; Capp, Fifth Monarchy Men, 66, 70–74; P. G. Rogers, The Fifth Monarchy Men (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 35 –38; Barry Coward, The Cromwellian Protectorate (New York: Manchester University Press, 2002), 7–20. For Cromwell as advocate of the poor, see Worden, Rump Parliament, 274 –80. 51. Barnard, English Republic, 35 –38; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 364 –78; Ronald Hutton, British Republic, 1649–1660 (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), 62 –70; Patrick Little and David L. Smith, Parliaments and Politics during the Cromwellian Protectorate (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 136 – 40. 52. John Milton, Second Defense of the English People (London, 1654); Marchamont Nedham, A True State of the Case of the Commonwealth (London, 1654). For more on the relationship between republics and empires in the political thought of the English Revolution, see David Armitage, “The Cromwellian Protectorate and the Languages of Empire,” Historical Journal 35, no. 3 (1992): 531–55, and “Empire and Liberty: A Republican Dilemma,” in Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner, eds., Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, 2 vols. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 2:29 – 46. 53. Maurizio Viroli, “Machiavelli and the Republican Idea of Politics,” in Gisella Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli, eds., Machiavelli and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 158 –60; Michael Mallet, “The Theory and Practice of Warfare in Machiavelli’s Republic,” in ibid., 173 –80; Armitage, “Cromwellian Protectorate and the Languages of Empire,” 536; J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 375 –77; Firth, ed., Clarke Papers, 3:205 –7. 54. Andrews, British Committees, Commissions, and Councils of Trade and Plantations, 50; Allen B. Hinds, Calendar of State Papers of English Affairs in the Archives of Venice, 1655–1656 (London, 1930), 16 –24; Venables Narrative, appendix D, 138; Thomas Gage, The English-American: A New Survey of the West Indies (London, 1648), and “Some Brief and True Observations Concerning the West Indies Humbly Presented to His Highness, Oliver, Lord Protector of England, Scotland, and Ireland,” Bodleian Library Rawlinson Ms A 24 fol. 11; Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1993), 275; Robert Fallon, “Cromwell and the Western Design,” in Balachandra Rajan and Elizabeth Sauer, eds., Milton and the Imperial Vision (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1999), 148 –54; John Milton, A Manifesto of the Lord Protector . . . Whereas is Shown the Reasonableness of the Cause of this Republic Against the Depredations of the Spaniards (London, 1655), in The Prose Works of John Milton, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1859), 2:466. 55. Firth, ed., Clarke Papers, 3:203 –6; S. R. Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, 1649–1660, 4 vols. (London, 1894 –1903), 3:159; Steckley, ed., Letters of John Paige, May 27, 1654; Armitage, “Languages of Empire,” 531–55; Fallon, “Cromwell and the Western Design,” in Rajan and Sauer, eds., Milton and the Imperial Vision, 133 –54; Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “‘Errand into the Indies’: Puritan Colonization from Providence Island through the Western Design,” William and Mary Quarterly 45 (1988): 88; Bliss, Revolution and Empire, 64;

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Charles Korr, Cromwell and the New Model Foreign Policy toward France, 1649–1658 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 114 –16; John Russell Bartlett, Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations in New England, 1636–1663 (Providence, RI, 1857), 1:242 – 43. 56. Venables Narrative, vii, xxviii, 2; Firth and Davies, Regimental History of Cromwell’s Army, 666 –69; John Morrill, “Robert Venables, 1613 –1687,” in DNB Online (2008); Dunlop, ed., Ireland under the Commonwealth, 12, 15, 17, 24 –27, 31, 34 –35, 42, 48 – 49, 60, 63, 282. 57. Edward Winslow, Good News from New England, or, a True Relation of Things Very Remarkable at the Plantation of Plymouth in New England (London, 1624), 3; Larzer Ziff, Puritanism in America (New York: Viking, 1973), 187; Len Travers, “Edward Winslow, 1595 –1655,” in DNB Online (2008). 58. Steckley, ed., Letters of John Paige, May 27, 1654; Henderson, ed., Clarke Papers, 5:190, 200. 59. Venables’ Narrative, xxiii, 5, 40– 44, 91–93, 100, appendix A, 111; Seventh Report of the Historical Manuscripts Commission (London, 1879), 572; I.S., A Brief and Perfect Journal of the Late Proceedings and Success of the English Army in the West Indies, cont’d until June 1655 (London, 1655), 5 –6; The Picture of a New Courtier Drawn from a Conference between Mr Timeserver and Mr Plainheart (1656), A12, A16. 60. Capp, Cromwell’s Navy, 84; Firth, ed., Clarke Papers, 3:38; British Library Egerton Mss 2648 fos. 245. Poorer planters, unsurprisingly, bore the brunt of impressment. Barrington wrote that the gangs operated with such “irregularity” that “many lost all their servants, and others but few (if any) who far exceeded the former in estates ten times over . . . and ten times more.” 61. Bodleian Library Carte Ms 74 f01.37; Venables’ Narrative, 34, and appendix D, 140– 41. 62. British Library Sloane Mss 3926 fols. 13 –14; Venables’ Narrative, 13 –17, 25, appendix C, 124. Cassava was a sort of breadfruit that found a ready market across the Caribbean as a staple food for slaves and indentured servants. 63. Bodleian Library Carte Ms 74 f01.37; Venables’ Narrative, 27, 34, 40, appendix D, 132, appendix E, 154 –56. 64. British Library Sloane Mss 3926 fols. 15 –16; Venables’ Narrative, appendix D, 130; Kris Lane, Pillaging the Empire: Piracy in the Americas, 1500–1750 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), 97; John Esquemeling, The Buccaneers of America (London, 1684; rpt. New York, 1883), 6 –20, 39 – 40, 101–20. For the problem of plantation workers escaping by boat from Barbados, see An Act for the Good Governing of Servants, and Ordering the Rights Between Masters and Servants (September 27, 1661), in Acts of Assembly, Passed in the Island of Barbadoes, from 1648 to 1718 (London, 1721), 28. 65. Venables’ Narrative, appendix D, 127, 130–36, 140– 41, and appendix E,152; British Library Sloane Mss 3926 fols. 15 –16; British Library Egerton Mss 2648 fol. 246. 66. Venables’ Narrative, appendix D, 140; British Library Sloane Mss 3926 fols. 27–30; British Library Egerton Mss 2648 fos. 248; Bodleian Library Rawlinson Mss A 36 fol. 368, 374 –375; 37 fols. 27–33.

chapter seven 1. The Banner of Truth Displayed (London, 1656), 1, 11. 2. Bodleian Library Rawlinson Mss A 39 fol. 420; 57 fols. 8 –13; 328 fol. 84; Charles Maclean Andrews, British Committees, Commissions, and Councils of Trade and Plantations (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1908), 45, 49 –58, 63, 67–68; G. E. Aylmer, “Martin Noell, 1614 –1665,” in Lawrence Goldsman, ed., Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; online ed. 2008), hereafter DNB Online (2008). For more on Noell’s import as a key figure in English expansion, see

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in particular Maurice Ashley, Financial and Commercial Policy under the Cromwellian Protectorate (London: Frank Cass, 1934, 1972), 2, 4, 7, 8, 10, 12, 14, 54, 65, 87, 100, 102, 134 –35, 162, 178; Richard Pares, Merchants and Planters, Economic History Review supplement 4 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 6, 59 –60; Richard Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British West Indies, 1623–1773 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974, 2000), 90–92. 3. James Revel, The Poor Unhappy Transported Felon’s Sorrowful Account of his Fourteen Years Transportation at Virginia in America (York, n.d.). 4. Charles Banks, “Thomas Venner: The Boston Wine-Cooper and Fifth Monarchy Man,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register 47 (1893): 437– 44; Joseph Felt, The Annals of Salem from Its First Settlement, 2 vols. (Salem, 1849), 2:577. 5. Scholars have long maintained that while the English in the West Indies had largely transitioned from “servants to slaves” by the 1660s, the same could not be said for the Chesapeake until much later in the century. This view concerning the transition in the Chesapeake has been challenged however, by John C. Coombs and Lorena Walsh, who see the process beginning there in the 1650s. For Coombs, see “The Phases of Conversion: A New Chronology for the Rise of Slavery in Early Virginia,” William and Mary Quarterly 68, no. 3 (2011): 332 –60; for Walsh, see Motives of Honor, Pleasure, and Profit: Plantation Management in the Colonial Chesapeake, 1607–1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). 6. Banner of Truth Displayed, 24. 7. For the relationship between indentured servitude and slavery in the mid-seventeenth century, see John Donoghue, “‘Out of the Land of Bondage’: The English Revolution and the Atlantic Origins of Abolition,” American Historical Review 115, no. 3 (2010): 943 –74; Edmund S. Morgan, American Freedom, American Slavery (London: W. W. Norton, 1975); Betty Wood, The Origins of American Slavery: Freedom and Bondage in the English Colonies (New York: Macmillan, 1998); Russell R. Menard, “From Servants to Slaves: The Transformations of the Chesapeake Labour System,” in Colin A Palmer, The Worlds of Unfree Labor: From Indentured Servitude to Slavery (London: Ashgate, 1998); Hilary McD. Beckles, White Servitude and Black Slavery in Barbados, 1627–1715 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), and “The Concept of ‘White Slavery’ in the English Caribbean during the Early Seventeenth Century,” in John Brewer and Susan Staves, eds., Early Modern Conceptions of Property (London: Routledge, 1996), 572 –84; Michael Guasco, “From Servitude to Slavery,” in Toyin Falola and Kevin Roberts, eds., The Atlantic World, 1450–2000 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008). 8. Charles Bayly, A True and Faithful Warning unto the People and Inhabitants of Bristol (London, 1663), 8 –9. 9. William Bullock, Virginia Impartially Examined, and Left to Public View (London, 1649), 13 –14, 44; Lionel Gatford, Publick Good without Private Interest (London, 1657), 4 –5; Beckles, White Servitude and Black Slavery in Barbados, 50–51; John Wareing, “‘Violently Taken Away or Cheatingly Duckoyed’: The Illicit Recruitment in London of Indentured Servants for the American Colonies, 1645 –1718,” London Journal 26, no. 2 (2001): 1–22; David Harris Sacks, The Widening Gate: Bristol and the Atlantic Economy, 1450–1700 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 304 –5. “Spirits” began delivering workers into bondage as early as 1618. That year, Owen Evans faced a charge of illegally “pressing maidens” in Devon and Dorset to serve in Bermuda and Virginia. See Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 1898 –99, 228 –30. 10. Bullock, Virginia Impartially Examined (London, 1649), 14, 53; the Virginia minister as quoted by T. H. Breen, James H. Lewis, and Keith Schlesinger, “Motive for Murder: A Servant’s Life in Virginia, 1678,” William and Mary Quarterly 40, no. 1 (1983): 116; Carl Helyar quoted in Susan Amussen, Caribbean Exchanges: Slavery and the Transformation of English Society, 1640– 1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 87. For more on Bullock, see Peter Thompson, “William Bullock’s ‘Strange Adventure’: A Plan to Transform Seventeenth Century

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Virginia,” William and Mary Quarterly 61, no. 4 (2004): 107–28. For the spirit trade in Ireland, see the Kings Inns Library Dublin, Prendergast Papers, 1:519; Robert Dunlop, ed., Ireland under the Commonwealth: Being a Selection of Documents Relating to the Government of Ireland from 1651 to 1659, 2 vols. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1913), 1:467, 475, 528. 11. For the spirit ring, see Kew Gardens PRO C.O. 389/2; Beckles, White Servitude and Black Slavery in Barbados, 51; John Wareing, “The Regulation and Organisation of the Trade in Indentured Servants for the American Colonies in London, 1645 –1718, and the Career of William Haverland, Emigration Agent,” PhD diss., University of London, 2000; “Preventative and Punitive Regulation in Seventeenth Century Social Policy: Conflicts of Interest and the Failure to Make ‘Stealing and Transporting Children and Others Persons’ a Felony, 1645 –1773,” Social History 27, no.3 (2002): 288 –308; Dunlop, ed., Ireland under the Commonwealth, 1:475, 528. In 1643, the Virginia legislature imposed terms of service on spirited workers arriving without indentures. See William Waller Hening, The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature in the Year 1619, 13 vols. (New York, 1819 –23), 1:257. Piecing together preexisting statutes, Barbados did the same in 1661, although the colony allowed the spirited the mostly hopeless prospect of suing for their return by proving that they had been kidnapped. See Act for the Good Governing of Servants (1661) in Acts of Assembly, Passed in the Island of Barbadoes, from 1648 to 1718 (London, 1721), 22. 12. Warren M. Billings, “The Law of Servants and Slaves in Seventeenth-Century Virginia,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 99 (1991): 45 –62; April Lee Hatfield, Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 135 –143; Allen, Invention of the White Race, 2:1–147, esp. 125 –30; Beckles, “Concept of ‘White Slavery,’” 572 –83; Robert J. Steinfeld, The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350–1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 3, 4, 44 – 46; David Barry Gaspar, “Rigid and Inclement: Origins of the Jamaica Slave Laws of the Seventeenth Century,” in Christopher Tomlins and Bruce Mann, eds., The Many Legalities of Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 78 –96; J. Nicholson, “Legal Borrowing and the Origins of Slave Law in the British Colonies,” American Journal of Legal History 33 (1994): 38 –54; William Weston to Robert Thresher, November 1625, quoted in Allen, Invention of the White Race, 2:108. 13. Before the late seventeenth century, Africans in the Chesapeake sometimes served as bond slaves. See Timothy Breen and Stephen Innes, “Myne Owne Ground”: Race and Freedom on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, 1640–1676 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 8 –15. For examples of people in Britain and Ireland and throughout the empire using the term slave or bond slave in reference to so-called indentured servants, see John Cordy Jeafferson, ed., Middlesex County Records, vols. 3 – 4 (London: Middlesex Co. Records Society, 1888), 3:306, 336; Susan Myra Kingsbury, The Records of the Virginia Company of London: The Court Book from the Manuscript in the Library of Congress, 4 vols. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1906), 4:235; Bullock, Virginia Impartially Examined, 13 –14, 47; Bayly, True and Faithful Warning, 8 –9; Banner of Truth Displayed, A2, 90; Gatford, Publick Good without Private Interest, 4 –5; Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (London, 1657), 31, 43 – 44, and also quoted in Amussen, Caribbean Exchanges, 60; Jerome S. Handler and Lon Shelby, “A Seventeenth-Century Commentary on Labor and Military Problems in Barbados,” Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society 34 (1973): 117–21. Handler and Shelby transcribed and edited a 1667 manuscript titled “Some Observations on the Island of Barbados.” For “white negger” references, see Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, 18; Abbot Emerson Smith, Colonists in Bondage: White Servitude and Convict Labor in America, 1607–1776 (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1965), 309; Vincent Harlow, A History of Barbados, 1625–1685 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926), 293. For Whistler, see British Library Sloane Mss 3926 fol. 8. For high mortality rates among bond slaves, see Allen, Invention of the White Race, 2:123n41, 143n180; George Gardyner, A Description of the New World; or, America Islands and Continent (London, 1651), 99.

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14. For an elaboration of this discussion and the attendant historiography, see Donoghue, “‘Out of the Land of Bondage.’” 15. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 9; Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon, 2000), 125; Beckles, “Concept of White Slavery in the English Caribbean,” 577. 16. Ligon, True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes, 31; Susan Scott Parrish, “Richard Ligon and the Atlantic Science of Commonwealths,” William and Mary Quarterly 67, no. 2 (2010): 209 – 48; Bodleian Library Rawlinson Mss A 37 fol. 27–33; Amussen, Caribbean Exchanges, 46, 60–63; Carla Gardina Pestana, The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 1640–1661 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 208 –12; Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra, 124 –28; Revel, Poor Unhappy Transported Felon, 7. 17. Hilary McD. Beckles, “A ‘Riotous and Unruly Lot’: Irish Indentured Servants and Freemen in the English West Indies, 1644 –1713,” William and Mary Quarterly 47, no. 4 (1990): 503 –22, and “Rebels and Reactionaries: The Political Responses of White Labourers to Planter-Class Hegemony in Seventeenth-Century Barbados,” Journal of Caribbean History 15 (1981): 1–19; Linebaugh and Rediker, Many-Headed Hydra, 124 –28; Revel, Poor Unhappy Transported Felon, 6. 18. Corporation of London Record Office Sessions File 139, May 29, 1657; Noel Sainsbury, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, 1661–1668 (London, 1880), 476; J. H. LeFroy, Memorials of the Discovery and Early Settlement of the Bermudas or Somers Islands, 1511–1687 (London, 1937), 2:177; John Perrot, Battering Rams Against Rome (London, 1661), 123 –24; James Carroll, John Perrot: Early Quaker Schismatic (London: Friends Historical Society, 1971), 13 –14. 19. In 1655, the Protectorate’s revolutionary prisoners included the Levellers John Wildman and John Lilburne, Major General Robert Overton, and the Fifth Monarchist leaders Christopher Feake and John Rogers. Within the next two years, they would be joined intermittently by Colonel John Okey, Henry Vane, Thomas Venner, and the Fifth Monarchist naval officer John Portman. The list represents some of the most important republicans associated with the Cromwellian opposition. For the prisoners and the decimation, see Bodleian Library, Rawlinson Mss A 47 fol. 21; C. H. Firth, ed., The Clarke Papers, 4 vols. (London: Camden Society, 1891), 3:39, 53; P. G. Rogers, The Fifth Monarchy Men (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), 62 –77; Barry Coward, The Cromwellian Protectorate (New York: Manchester University Press, 2002), 64 –84; W. E. Leveson, “Goffe and Whalley,” Boston Athenaeum Cutter Catalogue 5.9B (v. 114), 17. For the import of transatlantic news transmission concerning the political impact of the Western Design, see Nicole Greenspan’s excellent article “News and the Politics of Information in the Mid Seventeenth Century: The Western Design and the Conquest of Jamaica,” History Workshop Journal 69 (2010): 1–26. 20. Cromwell to Goodson, October 30, 1655, quoted in David Armitage, “The Cromwellian Protectorate and the Languages of Empire,” Historical Journal 35, no. 3 (1992): 542. For more on providential thinking in regard to the withdrawal of God’s favor, see Christopher Hill, “God and the English Revolution,” History Workshop 17 (1984): 21–22. 21. Firth, ed., Clarke Papers, 3:60; Armitage, “Cromwellian Protectorate and the Languages of Empire,” 540; Greenspan, “News and the Politics of Information,” 2; Jason Peacey, “Cromwellian England: A Propaganda State?” History 91 no. 302 (2006): 186. For a broader explanation of how and why authors undertook the work of propaganda during the Revolutionary era, see Peacey’s chapter “Authors and the Propaganda Impulse,” in his Politicians and Pamphleteers: Propaganda during the English Civil Wars and Interregnum (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004). 22. Greenspan, “News and the Politics of Information,” 9 –10; Peacey, “Cromwellian England,” 187; Marchamont Nedham (?), A Dialogue Containing a Compendious Discourse Concerning the Present Design in the West Indies (London, 1655), 5, 6, 9, 17, 20, 21.

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23. Robert Blackborne, Letter from a Christian Friend in the City to his Friend (London, 1656), 7. 24. I found this document in the Bodleian Library, among the unpublished manuscripts of Secretary of State John Thurloe, who also served as the Protectorate’s spymaster. In that capacity, Thurloe kept a close eye on Fifth Monarchists and former Levellers. Instructions on the manuscript dated February 26, 1655, direct the bearer to “carry to the press to be printed by Mr. Overton.” It’s likely that “The New Design Discovered” was intercepted by Thurloe’s spies while it was en route to “Mr. Overton,” thus explaining its presence among Thurloe’s unpublished papers. No tract bearing this title appears in the Wing Short Title Catalogue nor in the Thomason tracts, making it highly unlikely that the work ever made it into print. See Rawlinson Mss A 24. fols. 17–34 for the text of “The New Design Disovered.” The Mr. Overton concerned here may have been Henry Overton the bookseller. But due to Henry Overton’s ties with merchant-revolutionaries in John Goodwin’s church and thus the supporters of the Western Design, it’s unlikely that he is the person addressed as “Mr. Overton” on the manuscript. The printer for whom the tract was most likely intended was the Leveller Richard Overton. Overton fled to Amsterdam in February 1655 to escape the increasing scrutiny of Protectorate officials, who regarded him as a scheming seditionist. The timing of his removal to Holland coincides with that of the possible interception of “The New Design Discovered” manuscript; if Richard Overton the Leveller was indeed the Overton intended to receive the tract, its capture by the government would certainly have helped convince him that he was no longer safe in England. 25. “The New Design Discovered,” Bodleian Library Rawlinson Mss A 24, fols. 17–29. 26. Francis Henderson, ed., The Clarke Papers: Further Selections from the Papers of William Clarke (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 5:236 –37; Bodleian Library Rawlinson Mss A 21 fols. 390–93. Whether the officers meant to include Africans and Indians in their reference to “all men . . . in bonds” cannot be proved one way or another, but the universality of the statement in an age when the widespread practice of racialized slavery in the colonies had become common knowledge at least suggests this possibility. 27. Blair Worden, “Harrington’s Oceana: Origins and Aftermath, 1651–1660,” in David Wootton, ed., Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 1649–1776 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 125. Although Worden argues that Harrington wrote much of Oceana before 1654, the groundswell of opposition to the Protectorate after the failure of the Western Design occasioned its publication then. Milton is quoted in Jonathan Scott, “What Were Commonwealth Principles?” Historical Journal 47, no. 3 (2004): 612. The poet published his lyrical masterpiece after the Restoration, but the experience informing the work cannot be divorced from the imperial crisis sparked by the fallout from the Western Design. Since the republican writings of Milton and Harrington (and Nedham) have received so much attention from other scholars, I have decided not to explore them at length here. 28. Blair Worden, “Oliver Cromwell and the Sin of Achan,” in Derek Beales and Geoffrey Best, eds., History, Society and the Churches (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), and “Providence and Politics in Cromwellian England,” Past and Present, no. 109 (1985): 92 –99; Armitage, Ideological Origins of the British Empire, 136. 29. Armitage, “ Cromwellian Protectorate and the Language of Empire,” 545. 30. Henry Vane, A Healing Question (London, 1656), 5, 21, 32, 33; Ruth E. Mayers, “Real and Practicable, Not Imaginary and Notional: Sir Henry Vane, ‘A Healing Question,’ and the Problems of the Protectorate ,”Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 28, no. 1 (1996): 37–72. 31. Vane, Healing Question, 2, 3, 45; Firth, Last Years of the Protectorate, 1:4. 32. Firth, ed., Clarke Papers, 3:65; Dialogue Containing a Compendious Discourse, 17. 33. Sainsbury, ed., CSPC 1574–1660, 441, 447; CSPC 1675–1676 (Addenda, 1574 –74), 100; Firth and Rait, eds., Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 2:1262 –64; Bodleian Library Rawlinson Mss A 37 fol. 197; 39 fol. 320; 57 fols. 8 –13.

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34. Christopher Tomlins, Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 21; Bodleian Library Rawlinson Mss A 35 fol. 163; Kew Gardens, London PRO C 66 2912 /7; Sainsbury, CSPC 1547–1660, 324, 343; S. R. Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, 1649–1656, 4 vols. (New York: Longmans, Greene, 1903), 4:33; Peter Wilson Coldham, A Social History of Forced Emigration to the Americas of Felons, Destitute Children, Political and Religious Non-conformists, Vagabonds, Beggars and Other Undesirables, 1607–1776 (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing, 1992), 50; John Prendergast, The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland (Dublin: Mellifont, 1922), 145; Coldham, Emigrants in Chains, 50; Greene, CSPC 1656–1657, 324, 343; Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth, 4:33; Thomas Birch, ed., A Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe (London, 1742), 4:15 –30. 35. J.F., A Friendly Letter of Advice to the Soldiers from a Quondam member of the Army (London, 1659), 3 – 4; Dunlop, ed., Ireland under the Commonwealth, 2:50, 133 –34; Pestana, English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution, 187–91; Sainsbury, ed., CSPC 1574–1660, 447; Bodleian Library Rawlinson Mss A 14 fol. 92. This last document contains the May 1654 petition of Robert Tilghman, who wrote, “[T]here hath been many soldiers brought away from their representative services in the West Indies under pretenses of bringing them for England and sold away in the islands of Virginia and Barbados.” 36. Prendergast, Cromwellian Settlement, 326; An Act for the Attainder of the Rebels in Ireland: At the Parliament Begun at Westminster the 17th Day of September, 1656 (London, 1657); A. B. Hinds, ed., Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts Relating to English Affairs (London: Longman, 1930), 148, 184, 209, 309, hereafter CSPV 1655–1656; Beckles, White Servitude and Black Slavery in Barbados, 47; David Eltis, “Seventeenth Century Migration and the Slave Trade: The English Case in Comparative Perspective,” in Jan Lucansen and Leo Lucansen, eds., Migration, Migration History, History: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives (Bern: Peter Lang, 1997), 96; Sainsbury, ed., CSPC 1574–1660, 401, 407, 409, 419, 426, 428, 430, 431, 441, 458; Kings Inns Library Dublin, Prendergast Papers, 1:188 –90; Petty quoted in Rediker and Linebaugh, ManyHeaded Hydra, 146 – 47. 37. Stephen Innes, Labor in a New Land: Economy and Society in Springfield (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), and “The Massachusetts Body of Liberties,” in Old South Leaflets (Boston: Directors of the Old South Work), 7:261–67. 38. Sainsbury, ed., CSPC 1547–1660, 407; “Law Case: Master Samuel Symonds against Irish Slaves, William Downing and Philip Welch, Salem Quarterly Court, Salem, Massachusetts, June 25, 1661,” in Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County, Massachusetts, 1656–1662 (Salem: Essex Institute, 1912). For more on servitude in New England, see Lawrence Towner, A Good Master Well Served: Masters and Servants in Colonial Massachusetts, 1620–1750 (New York: Garland, 1998), especially chaps. 3, 4, and 7. Published four decades after he completed it at Northwestern in 1955 as a PhD dissertation, Towner’s book, a treasure trove of archival research, may well be the best study we have on colonial servitude, not just in New England but in the entire English Atlantic. For the book’s publication odyssey, see Alfred F. Young’s intriguing introduction. 39. For Saltonstall’s career in the 1640s, see chapter 4 above, 139 –42. 40. Robert E. Moody, ed., The Saltonstall Papers, 2 vols. (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1972 –74), 1:138 –39; James Savage, ed., The History of New England from 1630–1649 by John Winthrop, Esq., 2 vols. (Boston: Phelps and Farnham, 1825), 298 –300; Allen Bailey Forbes, The Winthrop Papers, 6 vols. (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1947), 5:37–38. 41. Moody, ed., Saltonstall Papers, 1:37, 138 –39; Nathaniel Shurtleff, ed., The Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, 1642–1649 (Boston, 1854), 2:98 –99, 129, 136. 42. John Russell Bartlett, ed., Records of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations in New England, vol. 1, 1636–1663 (Providence, RI, 1857), 38 –65, 134 –35; J. S. Maloy, The Colonial Origins of Modern Democratic Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 167–69.

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43. Henry Turner, “William Coddington in Rhode Island Colonial Affairs,” Rhode Island Historical Tracts, no. 4 (Providence, 1878), 22 –57; Sydney James, John Clarke and His Legacies: Religion and Law in Colonial Rhode Island, 1638–1750, ed. Theodore Swight Bozeman (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 49 –52. 44. Forbes, ed., Winthrop Papers, 5:38 –39; Elaine Forman Crane, A Dependent People: Newport in the Revolutionary Era (New York: Fordham University Press, 1962), 17; Lorenzo Johnston Greene, The Negro in Colonial New England, 1620–1776 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942), 30; Rhode Island Court Records: Records of the Court of Trials of Providence Plantations, 1647–1662 (Providence, 1920), 1:41. 45. Bartlett, ed., Records of the Colony of Rhode Island, 242 – 43. 46. Jeafferson, ed., Middlesex County Records, 3:337– 41. Capp, Fifth Monarchy Men, 77; John Donoghue, “Radical Republicanism in England, America, and the Imperial Atlantic, 1624 –1661,” PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2006, 360–362; Samuel How, The Sufficiencie of the Spirits Teaching Without Human Learning, or A Treatise tending to prove Humane Learning to be no help to the Spiritual Understanding of the Word of God (London, 1655). 47. Bodleian Library Rawl Mss A 39 fol. 528; 47 fol. 27; Firth, ed., Clarke Papers, 3:62; Birch, ed., Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe, 4:302 –17; Vavassor Powell, A Word for God or a Testimony on Truth’s Behalf from Several Churches and Diverse Hundreds of Christians in Wales (London, 1655), A, 4, 5. 48. Birch, ed., Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe, 4:184 –87, 318 –32; Champlin Burrage, “The Fifth Monarchy Insurrections,” English Historical Review 25 (1910): 723. Rumors began circulating at this time that Venner had hatched a plot to blow up the Tower of London, where he was then employed as a wine cooper. 49. Birch, ed., Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe, 4:318 –32, 343; The Old Leaven Purged Out . . . A True and Faithful Narrative . . . of the Congregation formerly Walking with Mr. John Simpson (London, 1658). 50. The Leveller, Or the Principles and Maxims Concerning Government and Religion (London, 1659), 13; The Old Leaven Purged Out, 4nF; Bodleian Rawlinson Mss A 39 fol. 528; 47 fol. 23; England’s Remembrancer (London, 1656), A, 2. 51. Birch, ed., Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe, 4:639 –52; Burrage, “Fifth Monarchist Insurrections,” 727; I.S., The Picture of a New Courtier Drawn from a Conference between Mr Timeserver and Mr Plainheart (1656), a5, a6, a13. I.S. wrote this pamphlet specifically to rebut A Dialogue Containing a Compendious Discourse Concerning the Present Design in the West Indies, the government propaganda tract defending the Western Design published anonymously in September 1655 but written most likely by Marchamont Nedham (see pp. 252 –53 above). In The Picture of a New Courtier, I.S. replaces the debate between the soldier and the sailor in A Dialogue with another conducted between “Mr. Plain Heart,” a saint who condemns the Western Design, and “Mr. Time Server,” a composite stand-in for the corrupt sycophants working for the Protectorate government. My thanks to Bernard Capp for the reference portraying Cromwell as a mass murderer. 52. Banner of Truth Displayed, A2, 1; England’s Remembrancer, 5; Prophets Malachy and Isaiah Prophecying to the Saints and Professors . . . of the Great Things the Lord Will Do in this Their Day (London, 1656), 10–11; A Standard Set Up (London, 1657), 6 –7. 53. Bullock, Virginia Impartially Examined, 44; Harlow, History of Barbados, 300; Beckles, White Servitude and Black Slavery, 50. For court records concerning East London and spiriting, see Jeafferson, Middlesex County Records, 3:99, 224, 229, 239, 256, 269, 336, 381. 54. Noel Sainsbury, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, 1661–1668 (London, 1880), 220; Jeafferson, ed., Middlesex County Records, 3:254 –55, 259, 278; Christopher Lloyd, The British Seaman: A Social Survey, 1200–1860 (London: Collins, 1968), 127–29. 55. Banner of Truth Displayed, A2, 15, 53, 54, 90.

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56. Charles Banks, “Thomas Venner: The Boston Wine-Cooper and Fifth Monarchy Man,” New England Historical and Genealogical Register 47 (1893): 437– 44; Burrage, “Fifth Monarchy Insurrections,” 127; Bodleian Library Rawlinson Mss A 49 fol. 110; 57 fol. 191; Birch, ed., Collection of the State Papers of John Thurloe, 4:186 –87; British Library Add Mss 4459 fols. 111–12; Greene, ed., CSPD 1657, 825 –26; Capp, Fifth Monarchy Men, 258 –59; William Aspinwall, The Legislative Power is Christ’s Peculiar Prerogative (London, 1656), 45.

epilogue 1. Patrick Little and David L. Smith, Parliaments and Politics during the Cromwellian Protectorate (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 102 – 47; Ruth E. Mayers, 1659: The Crisis of the Commonwealth (Suffolk, UK: Boydell, 2004), 45 –72. 2. Leo Francis Stock, ed., Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments Respecting North America, 5 vols. (Washington, 1924), 1:247–63; England’s Slavery or Barbados Merchandize (London, 1659), 3 –11; Guibon Goddar, ed., The Diary of Thomas Burton, Esq., Member in the Parliaments of Oliver and Richard Cromwell, 1656 to 1659 (London, 1828), 244 –53; Carla Gardina Pestana, The English Atlantic in an Age of Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 208 –12; John Cordy Jeafferson,, ed., Middlesex County Records, 4 vols. (London: Middlesex Co. Records Society, 1888), 3:278 –79. 3. Violet Ann Rowe, Sir Henry Vane the Younger: A Study in Political and Administrative History (London: Athlone, 1970), 218 –30; Ronald Hutton, The British Republic, 1649–1660 (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), 118 –30. For a strong argument that 1659 saw an impressive resurgence of republican writing that has been undeservedly neglected by scholars, see Mayer, 1659: The Crisis of the Commonwealth, 1–9, 182 –228. 4. Bernard Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men: A Study in Seventeenth-Century English Millenarianism (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), 195 –98; P. G. Rogers, The Fifth Monarchy Men (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 102 –9; A Door of Hope (London, 1661), 3. 5. Door of Hope, 10; A Standard Set Up (London, 1657), pt. 25; A Banner of Truth Displayed (London, 1656), 3. 6. John Donoghue, “‘Out of the Land of Bondage’: The English Revolution and the Atlantic Origins of Abolition,” American Historical Review 115, no. 4 (2010): 971 and n90. For the similarities between Leveller and Fifth Monarchist views on capital punishment, see Samuel Chidley, Retsah, A Cry Against a Crying Sin . . . by Killing of Men Merely for Theft (London, 1652), 16 –17. 7. Standard Set Up, 15; Door of Hope, 5; Capp, Fifth Monarchy Men, 166. 8. Estimates of Venner’s band ranged from fifty to four hundred; all the accounts taken together suggest there were several columns of rebels converging on the city from different directions. See A Relation or History of the Rise and Suppression of the Fifth Monarchy within the Kingdom of England, the Chief of which Sect was one Thomas Venner, a Wine Cooper (London, 1661) and Thomas Howell, ed., Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason and Other Crimes and Misdemeanors, 1671–1678 (London: T. C. Hanserd, 1810), 6:67–70. 9. For the 1661 rising itself, see Champlin Burrage, “The Fifth Monarchy Insurrections,” English Historical Review 25 (1910): 738 – 45; Bruce Watson, “The Compter Prisons of London,” London Archeologist 7 (Winter 1993): 115 –18. In late December 1641, revolutionary crowds had mobilized at the Wood Street Compter to free comrades imprisoned for criticizing the bishops; in 1653, the New Model veteran and probable Fifth Monarchist Isaack Graye, imprisoned in Wood Street for nonpayment of tithes, demanded that the government begin collecting the fees “so that there be no more beggars in England.” In 1658, after Protectorate officials hustled John Clarke and Wentworth Day into the Poultry Counter for violent rhetoric directed against Cromwell, the pair issued a Fifth Monarchist manifesto from the prison. See A Narrative wherein

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is Faithfully Set Forth the Sufferings of John Canne, Wentworth Day, and John Clarke (London, 1658). 10. Laurence Echard, History of England (London, 1707), 69; “A Relation of the Arraignment and Trial of Those Who Made the Late Rebellious Insurrection in London, 1661,” in Walter Scott, ed., The Somer’s Tracts (London, 1809 –15), 4:470–71; Mary Anne Everett Greene, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, Charles II, 1660–1661 (London, 1860), 470; Munster Paralleled in the Late Massacre Committed by the Fifth Monarchists (London, 1661), 34 –35. 11. The Last Farewell to the Rebellious Sect Called the Fifth Monarchy Men on Wednesday January the Ninth (London, 1661), 3; Burrage, “Fifth Monarchy Insurrections,” 745 – 47; Mary Anne Everett Greene, ed., Calendar of State Papers Domestic, Charles II, 1661 (London: Public Record Office, 1861), 470; Echard, History of England, 108. 12. David S. Lovejoy, Religious Enthusiasm in the New World: Heresy to Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 110; Rowe, Sir Henry Vane, 241. 13. Roger Williams, The Correspondence of Roger Williams, ed. Glenn W. LaFantasie, 2 vols. (Hanover, NH: Brown University Press, 1988), 2:389 –90, 395 –98; Howard Chapin, ed., The Documentary History of Rhode Island, 2 vols. (Providence: Preston and Rounds, 1919, 1979), 2:25. 14. Maurice Ashley, Financial and Commercial Policy under the Cromwellian Protectorate (London: Frank Cass, 1934, 1972), 102. 15. Michael J. Jarvis, “Owen Rowe, 1593 –1661,” in Lawrence Goldsman, ed., Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, gen. ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; online ed. 2008), hereafter DNB Online (2008); Francis Bremer, “John Davenport, 1597–1670,” in ibid.; Valerie Pearl, London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution: Government and National Politics, 1626–1643 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), 184; Capp, Fifth Monarchy Men, 223; Jeafferson, ed., Middlesex County Records, 3:306. 16. Zachariah Whitman, The History of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company (Boston, 1842), 153; William Sidney Rossiter, Days and Ways in Old Boston (Boston, 1914), 94; R. P. Mahaffy, ed., Calendar of State Papers Relating to Ireland, 1660–1662 (London: Public Record Office, 1905), 549; Samuel Sewall, The Selling of Joseph: A Memorial (Boston, 1700). 17. Kristen Block, “Cultivating Inner and Outer Plantations: Property, Industry, and Slavery in Early Quaker Migration to the New World,” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 8, no. 3 (2010): 515 – 48; Carla Gardina Pestana, Quakers and Baptists in Colonial New England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Charles Bayly, A True and Faithful Warning Unto the People and Inhabitants of Bristol (London, 1663), 11–13; James Carroll, John Perrot: Early Quaker Schismatic (London: Friends Historical Society, 1971). 18. For the trial and execution of the three Quakers and the Friends’ reaction, see A Call from Death to Life and Out of the Dark Ways and Worships of the World where the Seed is Held in Bondage under the Merchants of Babylon (London, 1660), quote on 7; George Bishop, New England Judged By the Spirit of the Lord (London, 1661). More on the life of Mary Dyer can be found in Ruth Plimpton, Mary Dyer: Biography of a Quaker Rebel (Boston: Branden, 1994). 19. Robert E. Moody, ed., The Saltonstall Papers, 1607–1789, 2 vols. (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1972), 1:37–39; Franklin Bowditch Dexter, ed., The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1901), 1:185; Noel Sainsbury, “Virginia in 1658 – 1662,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 18 (1910): 293; Sydney James, John Clarke and His Legacies: Religion and Law in Colonial Rhode Island, 1638–1750 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 62 –97; Roger Hayden, ed., The Records of a Church of Christ in Bristol, 1640–87 (Bristol: Bristol Record Society, 1974), 34, 36, 282 –96. The Bermuda colonist William Righton returned to England in the Interregnum and signed the Declaration of Gathered Churches, a millenarian reform petition that John Clarke helped to circulate. Righton later returned to Bermuda, where he befriended Quakers and even mounted a “republican” rebellion against the island’s Royalist governors. Sainsbury, ed., CSPC 1661, 7:512; 10:699; Capp, Fifth

not es to pages 290 – 91

351

Monarchy Men, 260; J. H. LeFroy, Memorials of the Discovery and Early Settlement of the Bermudas or Somers Islands, 1511–1687 (London, 1937), 2:53, 99. 20. Roger Williams to the Massachusetts General Court, May 10, 1654, in Williams, Correspondence of Roger Williams, 2:409 –10; Keith Stavely, “Roger Williams and the Enclosed Gardens of New England,” in Francis Bremer, ed., Puritanism: Transatlantic Perspectives on a SeventeenthCentury Anglo-American Faith (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993), 265 –70. 21. Edwin S. Gaustad, Roger Williams (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); James Ernst, Roger Williams: New England Firebrand (New York: AMS Press, 1932, 1969). For an engaging analysis of the origins of King Philip’s War, see Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Vintage, 1998), 1–70. 22. Roger Williams to the Town of Providence, ca. 1654, quoted in Thomas Williams Bicknell, The History of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations (New York: American Historical Society, 1920), 1:247. 23. I refer here to the work of Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker in The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon, 2000). For my appreciation of their book in relation to the legacy of the English Revolution, see my “Out of the Land of Bondage,” 946n11, 973 –74. 24. Door of Hope, 16.

Index

Note: An * indicates a Coleman Street Ward merchant revolutionary. Italicized page numbers refer to illustrations. Abbot, George, 24, 28, 34 Abbot, Elizabeth, 24 Abbot, Maurice, 6, 28, 29, 42, 50, 97, 240; Bermuda investments, 26, 49; bond slave trade, 22 –24; death, 91; forced loans, 85 –86; Petition of Right Debates, 31; trial of, 90–91 abolition, 241; Fifth Monarchists and, 275, 280–81, 287, 293 –94; Rhode Island and, 265 –67. See also English Revolution; republicanism, transatlantic Acadia, 141– 42 Act for the Attainder of the Rebels in Ireland, 259 Act for the Settlement of Ireland, 216, 218, 232 Acts and Orders of Rhode Island, 264 Africa: and the English Atlantic, 4, 201, 294; English merchants and, 17, 22, 239, 286. See also slave trades in the English Atlantic: in Africans Agreement of the People, An, 116, 163, 190–92, 194, 196, 225, 251, 264 *Alderne, Thomas, 213 –15 *Aldersely, Samuel, 53, 58 Allen, Rebecca, 272 *Allen, Thomas, 127, 213 –14 *Allen, William, 213 –14

Amsterdam, 105; as Radical Reformation breeding ground, 110, 173 ancient constitution: in England, 19, 101, 103, 111–13, 116 –18, 168, 169, 186; in New England, 60, 130, 144, 145, 264; in Virginia, 221. See also English common law; Magna Carta Anglo-Dutch War, 224 –26, 232, 291 Answer of the Elders of Several Churches, An, 125 Antapologia, or A Full Answer to an Apologetical Narration, 123 Antherson, Jonas, 272 Anthony, 250 Anti-Cavalierism, 115 –18 Antigua, 53; royalists in, 219; and Western Design, 233 Antinomian Controversy, 47; Aspinwall petition and, 71, 75 –76; elections of 1637 and, 72; Fast Day sermon sparks, 68 –69, 71; gendered dimensions of, 65, 67–68; generates intercolonial migration, 128 –29; relationship with Pequot War, 63; synod of 1637 and, 75; trials of antinomian leaders, 75 –76, 289; Winthrop’s account of, 140, 150. See also puritans: covenant of grace (or free grace) antinomianism: free grace theology of, 37–39,

353

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antinomianism (continued) 76; Holy Spirit and, 12, 40– 42, 47, 64, 281; inward/outward bondage and, 256, 279; New England Radical Reformation and, 65 –67; social criticism generated by, 41– 42, 281; tension with “human learning,” 11–12, 39 – 42, 281 antinomians, in Barbados, 287–88. See also Coleman Street Ward: gathered churches and antinomian conventicles of antinomians, in England, 11–12, 36 – 42, 166, 196; Fifth Monarchists as, 281; and heresiographers, 168, 169, 173. See also Coleman Street Ward: gathered churches and antinomian conventicles of; Levellers: political thought of antinomians, in Ireland, 251. See also Coleman Street Ward: gathered churches and antinomian conventicles of antinomians, in New England: attacked at Shawomet, 120–21; “common enemy” (with Indians), 77, 81, 142, 149, 150–52; converge on Rhode Island, 128 –29; Massachusetts banishes, 75 –76; Massachusetts executes, 290; Massachusetts restricts immigration of, 79; as seditionists, 75 –76, 122, 129, 142, 150–52. See also Coleman Street Ward: gathered churches and antinomian conventicles of apocalyptic belief: abolition and, 241, 275, 279 –81; and England’s “imperial moment,” 229, 237; before the English Revolution, 25, 48, 133 –34; inspired by English Revolution, 171, 172, 241; Mosaic Judicials and, 130, 227–28; puritan colonization and, 57; and reforms of Nominated Assembly, 227–28. See also Fifth Monarchists; King Jesus Apologetical Narration, An, 123 apprentices: and Bishops’ Wars, 86, 88; and outbreak of the Revolution, 83, 92 Aquidneck Island (later renamed Rhode Island), 128 Areopagetica, 183 Arminianism, 28, 179 Arminius, 28 Armitage, David. 5, 228, 256 Arnold, Richard, 194 Arnold, William, 143 – 44 Arraignment of Mr. Persecution, The, 178

Aspinwall, William, 67, 77, 79, 81, 129, 275 –76; banished from Rhode Island, 132; and Fifth Monarchist program, 227–28, 279 –80; Massachusetts trial and banishment of, 75 –76; Mosaic civil reform and, 130, 227–28; organizes Massachusetts antinomian petition, 71; returns to England, 227 Atherton, Humphrey, 120, 289 Attaway, Mrs., 172 –73 *Avery, Samuel, 218 Ayescue, George, 220–21 Aylmer, G. E., 205 Babb, Matthew, 250 Bacon, Francis, 37 Baltic Company, 213 Baptists, 172, 211–12; gathering churches in New and Old England, 171, 177, 290; persecuted in New England, 146, 170–71 Barbados, 53, 54, 55 –56, 80, 219; allegiance during English Revolution, 127–28, 220–21; “Barbadosed,” 242; bond slavery on, 223 –24, 248, 261; Commonwealth expedition to, 220–21; Quakers on, 288; and religious conflict, 124 –25; royalists on, 219 –21; slave rebellions on, 223; slavery on, 246, 259; and slave trading, 222 –23, 234, 258, 262, 265, 272; and the Western Design, 199, 230, 233 –34 Barber, Edward, 89, 174 Barebones, Praisegod, 227 Barebones Parliament. See Nominated Assembly *Barnardiston, Thomas, 50, 201, 213 –14, 218 Barrington, Francis, 199, 234 Bastwick, John, 34, 35, 180 Baxter, Richard, 168, 169 Bay Colony. See Massachusetts Bayly, Charles, 241– 45, 287–88 Beacon, Roger, 174 Beginning, The, 265 Bell, Daniel, 49 –50, 125 Bennett, Phillip, 124 Berkeley, William, 124, 127; and Virginia royalists, 219, 221 Berkshire, England, 88 Bermuda, 50; allegiance during English Revolution, 128; colonization of, 46, 49; and religious life, 49; royalists in, 219, 220,

index 221; slave rebellion on, 223; slavery on, 26, 250; tobacco trade, 220; and transatlantic religious debate, 122 –24; Western Design and, 230 Bermuda (or Somers Island) Company, 17, 26, 128 Bight of Benin, West Africa, 223 Billingsgate, 268; and profanity, 84 bishops, and outbreak of the Revolution, 83 –85, 86, 92, 94, 98. See also High Commission, Court of; Laud, William; Star Chamber, Court of Bishops’ Wars, 85 –89, 97, 125; and calling of Long Parliament, 90; and Root and Branch Petition, 92; and Treaty of Berwick, 86 Black Legend. See under Spain Blackborne, Robert, 253 Blake, George, 225 Bloody Tenent of Persecution, The, 178 Bodin, Jean, 133 Bodleian Library, 201 bond slavery. See slaveries in the English Atlantic, British and Irish bond slaves Boston, England, 35, 57, 64 Boston, Massachusetts, 287, 294; Antinomian Controversy breaks out in, 68 –69; established, 57–58; First Church of, 57–58, 68, 71, 72, 76, 125, 262, 286; Gorton’s trial held in, 122, 147; La Tour affair and, 141– 42; militia of, 163, 166, 241; site of antinomian spirituality, 65 Bourne, Nehemiah, 224 –25 Boye, Rice, 41 Braddick, Michael, 96 Brenner, Robert, 91, 103 Brentford, England, 172 Brief Relation of the Late Horrid Rebellion Acted in the Island of Barbados, A, 220 Bright, Francis, 58 Bristol, England, 294 Buckingham, England, 175 Bullock, William, 243, 272 Burford mutineers (Cornet James Thompson, Corporal Perkins, and Private John Church), 205 Burton, Henry, 34, 35 Butcher’s Blessing, The, 114, 115, 118 Butler, James (duke of Ormonde), as lord lieutenant, 202, 207, 208, 259

355

Cambridgeshire, England, 175 Campanella, Tomasso, 230 Canne, John, as puritan exile printer, 35, 104 Cannonicus, 147, 149 capitalism, 8, 247; and early modern English society, 14, 54 –55; human cost of, 250; and the imperial turn of the English Revolution, 291–93; and plantation slavery, 52, 260; and practical Christian republicanism, 291 Capp, Bernard, 226, 268 Caribbean. See West Indies Carisbrooke Castle, 257 Carlin, Norah, 204 Carolina, 49, 263 Carter, William, 170 Case of the Army Truly Stated, The, 190 Cassirer, Ernst, 61 Cato, 253 cavaliers, 84, 98, 115 Cecil, William, 19 “Certain Queries,” 204 Chapman, Livewell, 227, 255 Charles I (king), 25; and the Bishops’ Wars, 85; captured, 189; dismisses Short Parliament, 87; escapes captivity, 194; and “evil councilors,” 87, 95; executed, 202; “Five Members” and, 7, 99; flees London, 100; at Guildhall, crowd confronts, 99 –100; Irish Rebellion of 1641 and, 96; “personal rule” of, 34, 84, 111, 112, 264; Petition of Right debates and, 30, 32; “popish plot” and, 88, 95; rejects the Grand Remonstrance, 97; revokes Massachusetts charter, 125; Root and Branch Petition and, 92 –93; and the royal prerogative, 30, 32, 86, 87, 95, 111–12, 116 –18; trial of, 201 Charles II (king), 1, 110, 201, 281; and execution of Henry Vane, 285; invades Scotland, 219, 227; knights William Petty, 260; restored to the monarchy, 278 Charlestown, Massachusetts, 135 Chesapeake, 56, 61; bond slavery in, 23 –24, 55, 62 –63, 240, 245, 260; and increasing demand for unfree labor, 214; puritans in, 48 – 49, 124; royalists in, 216, 219 –21; and Virginia Company, 22 –27. See also Maryland; Powhattan Indians; tobacco; Virginia; Virginia Company Chesapeake Bay, 127

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Chidley, Katherine, 173 Chillenden, Edmund, 189 Claibourne, William, 127 Clarke, John, 67, 131; as Fifth Monarchist, 269, 289; on liberty of conscience, 134; mission to England, 263, 264, 267, 288; possible petitioner against spiriting, 289; secures Rhode Island charter, 289; as transatlantic Baptist leader, 171, 290 class, 23, 52, 56 –57, 89, 92, 185, 198, 210–11, 248, 266, 274, 293 –94 Coddington, William, 67, 71, 129 –32, 144, 264 Coke, Edward, 60–61, 103 Colchester, England, 89 Cole, John, 278 Cole, Mr., 251 Coleman Street Conclave Visited, 170 Coleman Street Ward: atypical importance of, 7, 241, 293 –94; center for republican political organization, 7, 102, 164, 167, 180, 188, 196, 201, 204, 205, 238, 241, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271, 275, 279, 281; description of, 14 –15; Fifth Monarchists and, 240– 41, 255, 268; gathered churches and antinomian conventicles of, 36, 38, 89, 121, 155, 168 –80, 196, 205, 213, 240– 41, 255, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271, 275, 279, 281, 290; Levellers and, 107, 164, 180–82, 188, 189, 194, 196, 241; merchant revolutionaries of, 6, 84, 85, 91–92, 96 –97, 101, 103, 119, 150, 200, 213 –16, 218, 219, 220, 221, 229, 237, 239 – 40, 267–76; migrants from New England in, 45 – 47, 58 –59, 69 –70, 74, 76, 121–22, 129, 135 – 40, 142, 159 –60, 170–74, 180, 188, 196, 267–76, 241, 286 –90; multiple factions of revolutionaries described, 6; popular politics of, and the outbreak of the Revolution, 83 –85, 86, 98, 100–102, 183; reputation for radical puritanism, 11–12, 108, 160; symbol of heresy and sedition, 170; women lead conventicles in, 172 –73. See also How, Samuel; Levellers; Overton, Richard: Coleman Street Ward underground press Coleman Street Ward, merchant investments: Baltic Company, 240; Barbados, 219; Bermuda, 26, 49; Chesapeake, 214; East India Company, 17, 31, 240; Guinea Company, 222; Ireland, 218 –19, 239; Irish

Adventurers, 218; Jamaica, 258; Levant Company, 239; Massachusetts Company, 52 –53; Montserrat, 219; Providence Island Company, 50; Royal African Company (Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa), 286; Saybrook Company, 69 –70, 135, 139; Virginia Company, 22 –24 Coleman Street Ward, places: Bell Alley, 15, 172, 173, 174 –76; Blue Anchor tavern, 283, 287; Coleman Street proper, 15, 275, 282; Moorfields (park), 86, 102, 106, 118, 204, 240; Nag’s Head tavern, 11–12, 41– 44, 47, 167, 180, 195, 281, 283; Old Jewry, 239; Red Lion tavern, 99, 100; Star tavern, 180, 195; St. Stephen’s parish, 11, 17, 28, 35, 100, 118, 213; Swann Alley, 15, 58, 170, 267, 268, 269, 270, 271, 275, 279, 281, 283; Whalebone tavern, 180, 195; Windmill tavern, 32, 180, 181, 194 Collins, William, 128 –29, 144 colonization: of Bermuda, 46; of “Carolina,” 49; of the Chesapeake, 22 –27; construction of racial hierarchy, 48, 51–52, 74, 82, 136 –37, 154, 241, 248, 266, 290, 293 –94; of English Atlantic, 47– 48; and English views of savagery and civility, 25, 26, 48, 61–62, 74, 122, 142, 151–60, 208 –10, 250–51, 266, 290; forms new class relationships, 23, 52, 56 –57; humanist concept of “cession” and, 61; as humanist solution to English social/economic problems, 20–24; Native American land rights and, 60–63, 290; of New England, 47, 52 –63, 134 –39; piracy and, 26 –27, 49 –52; of Providence Island, 46, 49 –52; purpose of, to advance Protestant Reformation, 13, 16, 42 – 43, 47, 56 –57, 59; sovereignty of English law and government and, 144 – 45, 147– 48, 152; United Colonies and, 142 – 43; vacuum domicilum and, 61–62; of the West Indies, 54 –55, 258 –60. See also Ireland Comenius, 154 Committee for Examinations, 169 –70, 172, 174, 175, 188 Committee for the Advance of Money, 215 Committee of Foreign Plantations (CFP), 121, 150–59 Committee of Public Safety, 103 commonality: antinomian thought of, 12, 41– 42; class consciousness of, 89, 92,

index 210–11, 274; deference and, 19; enslaved in colonies, 23, 119, 222 –23; against the expropriation of commons, 19, 186, 191, 193 –94, 197, 248; and Fifth Monarchy movement, 268; Lambe’s Coleman Street Ward church and, 174 –75; Leveller movement and, 180, 186 –87, 192 –93, 212; and opposition to Bishops’ Wars, 86, 88 –89, 90; and outbreak of English Revolution, 83 –85, 92 –94, 97–102, 116, 119; and Petition of Right debates, 31–34; and political economy of empire, 260, 292 –93; political labor of, 104; political views defined against humanist political conventions, 18, 23, 32, 34; portrayed as monster, 140, 151; rebellions of, 19 –20, 55; republican petitioning and, 101–2, 186 –87; resists bodily expropriation, 23, 31, 198 –99, 240– 41, 272 –73, 278; and the revolutionary body politic, 83 –85, 101–2, 113, 164, 180, 227, 268, 280; targeted for impressment, 88 –89, 194 –95, 198 –99, 206, 217, 270–72, 274 –76; transportation into colonial bond slavery, 23, 31, 211, 214 –15, 240– 41, 258 –60, 266, 270–72, 274 –76. See also English Atlantic: commonality of Commonwealth of England: created, 202; economic crisis, 210–11; Nominated Assembly, 226 –28; political factionalism, 277; Protectorate era, 228 –78; as a republic, 202 –26 Commonwealth of England, empire-building in the Atlantic: Anglo-Dutch naval war, 224 –26, 237; Atlantic commonality resists, 199, 209 –10, 223 –24, 226, 238; Commonwealth expedition to Barbados, 220–21; Commonwealth expedition to Virginia, 220–21; conquest of Ireland, 203, 206 –10, 232, 237–38, 250, 259 –60, 265, 291; finance, 217–19; “imperial moment,” 228 –29; impressment, 198 –99, 217, 225 –26, 232 –34, 258 –60, 270–72, 274 –76; legislation, 216, 218, 220–23; Protestant Reformation advanced by, 229 –30, 237, 291; slave trading and, 214 – 17, 239, 266, 269 –72, 274 –76, 277–78, 286; state first attempts, 200–201, 216, 237; transatlantic radicals resist, 241, 269 –72, 274 –76; and violence, 8, 210, 237–38, 291–92; Western Design, 229 –37, 258

357

Como, David, 105 –6 Company of Merchant Adventurers, 91 congregational church model, 7, 123 –25. See also Independents Connaught, Ireland, 218 Connecticut, 158; established as colony, 136; Fundamental Orders of, 137–38; and liberty of conscience, 138; and Pequot War, 46; as a “popular state,” 133; and Treaty of Hartford, 136 –37, 218; and the United Colonies, 142 – 43 Connecticut River Valley: and Coleman Street Ward migrants, 139; as colonial frontier, 70–71, 74, 139, 142 – 43, 208; colonization of, 134 –39, 158; English/Dutch/Pequot competition for, 69 –70; and the Pequot War, 73 –74 conscription. See impressment constitutional revolutions (ca. 1639 –1642): in England, 84 –85, 92 –119; in New England, 129 – 43, 158 –59 Cooke, George, 120, 208 –10 Cooper, Nicholas, 272 Cotton, John, 35, 53, 286; and excommunication of Anne Hutchinson, 76; inspires Anne Hutchinson, 64; Mosaic Judicials and, 138, 227; and Scots prisoners in Massachusetts, 261; synod of 1637 and, 75; and transatlantic religious debate, 123 –25. See also Keys of the Kingdom, The Council of State: and Anglo-Dutch War, 225; and English economic crisis, 211; Irish conquest and, 209, 216, 218; and Nominated Assembly, 228; and slave trading, 254, 256, 261; Trade Committee of, 239; and Western Design, 229, 230, 251–53 County Meath, Ireland, Dungan’s Hill, 207 Coupland, Patrick, 123 Craddock, Matthew, 58 Crelly, Patrick, 206 Cressy, David, 94 Cromwell, Oliver, 196, 257; apocalyptic beliefs of, 228 –29; death of, 277; and Fifth Monarchists, 257, 269, 271; installed as Lord Protector, 228; Irish conquest and, 203, 207, 218; Nominated Assembly and, 228; and Protectorate propaganda, 252 –53; regicide and, 201–2; and Western Design, 229 –32, 236, 251; works for release of John Lilburne from the Fleet, 90

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Cromwell, Oliver, and New Model Army: mutinies and, 163 –64, 194, 204 –5; politics and, 189; service, 163 –65 Cromwell, Richard, 278 Crooke, Samuel, 265 Cry for Justice, A, 86 Cuba, 230 “custom of the country.” See slaveries in the English Atlantic, British and Irish bond slaves: colonial law and Danger of Tolerating Levellers in a Civil State, The, 177 Dartmouth, England, siege of, 167 D’Aulnay, Charles, 141– 42 *Davenish, William, 215 Davenport, John, 6, 35 –36, 53, 58, 70, 160, 227; and conflict with Archbishop Laud, 28 –29; and excommunication of Anne Hutchinson, 76; and Fundamental Orders of New Haven, 138 –39; migrates to New England, 136; and transatlantic religious debate, 124 –25; and work with feoffees of impropriation, 29 –30, 92 Day, Wentworth, 6; death of, 286; as Fifth Monarchist, 268 –69, 281; imprisoned, 281; as Leveller and soldier, 163 –64, 189, 194, 196, 205; as republican icon, 268 Defoe, Daniel, 14 de Las Casas, Bartoleme, 25, 230 Denis, Robert, 221 democracy: Fifth Monarchists and, 280; as a “monster,” 140; in New England, 132 –33, 140, 145, 159, 263 –64; in the New Model Army, 194. See also Levellers: political thought of Denison, Stephen, 36 Denne, Henry, 155, 175, 186, 205 De Republica Anglorum. See under Smith, Thomas Desborough, Henry, 199 Devereux, Robert (earl of Essex), 114 Dialogue Containing a Compendius Discourse Concerning the Present Design in the West Indies, A, 252 –53, 257 Digby, George, 93 Digges, Dudley, 15, 31 Dinah, 173 Discourse on Western Planting, A, 20 Dixwell, John, 286 Doncaster Castle, 204

Donne, John, 24, 61–62 Door of Hope, A, 1, 2, 279 –80, 281, 294 Dorchester, Massachusetts, 166 Downing, Emmanuel, 265 Downing, William, 261–62 Drogheda, Ireland, 207–8, 232 Dublin, Ireland, 207 Duck, Arthur, 90 Dudley, Thomas, 70 Durand, William, 124 Dutch, 184; commercial rivalry with English, 49, 222, 233; English exile puritan press and, 35; English puritan exiles and, 35, 53, 70; Kieft’s War and, 146; and New England frontier, 69 –70, 142 – 43, 146; and piracy, 50; and slave trade to English West Indies, 220, 222 –23, 234. See also Amsterdam; United Provinces Dyer, Mary: allies with Anne Hutchinson, 64, 131; and “monster births,” 140, 150; transatlantic Quaker conversion, evangelism, and execution, 288 –89 Dyer, William, 288 Eastern Association, 166 East India Company, 17, 31, 213, 222 East Indies, and English commercial interests, 17, 22, 31, 34, 239 Eaton, John, 36, 41, 64, 76 Eaton, Samuel, 36 Eaton, Susan, 36 *Eaton, Theophilus, 6, 58; as first president of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, 53; as New Haven governor, 138 –39; and the United Colonies, 142 Edgehill, Battle of, 114 Edward the Confessor, laws of, 19, 168 Edwards, Thomas, 123, 173, 180; attacks John Goodwin, 172, 177, 178; attacks New Englanders on Coleman Street, 170; attacks radical politics of New Model soldiers, 169; attacks toleration and antinomianism, 168, 170; confrontation with Hugh Peter, 167; Lambe’s Coleman Street Ward church, description of, 174 –75. See also Gangreana Eikonklastes, 201 Elfrith, Daniel, 26, 49, 50 Eliot, John, 30 Elyman, Richard, 173 Endicott, John, 57, 71

index England’s Birthright Justified, 168, 181 England’s Complaint to Jesus Christ against the Bishops Cannons, 106, 111–13, 115 England’s Lamentable Slavery, 181 England’s Misery and Remedy, 181 English-American, The: A New Survey of the West Indies, 229 –30 English Atlantic, 4 –5, 231: capitalism and, 8, 52, 292; circular migration, 121, 149 –50, 163 –64, 171, 196, 200, 208 –10, 220, 224 –25, 227, 229, 237, 241, 250, 281, 286 –90, 294; circulation of print, 104, 123 –25, 142, 150–51, 157–58, 220, 227, 230, 294; circulation of radicals, 170, 173 –74, 196, 241, 250, 281, 287, 294; colonial allegiance during English Revolution, 125 –28, 219 –21; commonality of, 201, 222 –23, 248 –51, 260, 292 –94; intercolonial migration, 81, 128 –29, 134, 139, 144, 230; and language of American abolitionism, 287; Navigation Act, 221–23; Providence Island, first slave society in, 51–52; Radical-Magisterial Reformation conflict, 121–22, 144 –60; relationship with English Revolution, 121–22, 200– 201, 216 –23, 241, 287; slavery, popular notions of, 242; transatlantic migration, 47–51, 214, 286 –90; unfree colonial labor regime, 241, 243, 247, 259, 260, 264 –65. See also colonization; slave trades in the English Atlantic English common law, in colonial politics, 75, 144, 146 English Empire, exceptionalist view of, 223, 292. See also Commonwealth of England, empire building in the Atlantic; political economy of empire English Revolution: dialectical legacy of, 8, 291–94; “good old cause,” 241, 291; and import of Atlantic perspective, 237–38, 241, 291–94; and origins of abolition, 8, 293 –94 English West India Company, 49 equity. See practical Christianity Erasmus, 61 Essex, England, village of Bocking, 175 Europe, 13, 22, 25, 107, 222, 224, 230, 239, 247, 287. See also France; Germany; Italy; Spain; Thirty Years’ War; United Provinces Eyre, William, 209

359

Fairfax, Thomas, 163 –64, 165, 169, 194 Family of Love (Familists), 77, 150, 168 Farnell, James, 214 Fawkes, Guy, 114 felons, 214 –15, 240, 250, 258, 280 feoffees of impropriation, 28 –29, 53; and Root and Branch Petition, 92 Fenner, Dudley, 28 Fields, Jonathan Beecher, 54 Fiennes, Nathaniel, 103; and the Grand Remonstrance, 95; and the Nineteen Propositions, 102 –3 Fiennes, William (Lord Saye and Sele), 81, 95, 150 Fifth Monarchists, 238, 239, 277; and abolition, 275, 280–81, 287, 293 –94; All Hallows mass meeting, 268 –69; as antinomians, 281; and Coleman Street Ward, 7, 239, 268 –76; class consciousness of, 274; leaders from New England, 267–76; membership of, 268, 274; political thought of, 268 –76, 279 –81; against the Protectorate and slave trading supporters, 269 –72, 274 –76, 280–81; risings of (1657 and 1661), 1–2, 275 –76, 281–83, 294; and sin of Achan, 269, 275; and social and economic justice, 280; and Western Design, 269 –72, 274 –76. See also apocalyptic belief; A Door of Hope; practical Christianity; republicanism Fifth Monarchy, 171 Fleetwood, Charles, 209 Foster, Nicholas, 220 *Foxcroft, George, 53 Foxe, John, 106 free trade: as contested concept, 222; and slave trade, 222 –23 France: Massachusetts and, 141– 42, 263; war with English, 32, 217 Fulani people, 223 Gage, Thomas, 229 –30 Galway, Ireland, 261 Games, Alison, 59 Gangreana, 170, 178, 181 Gardiner, Lyon, 70 Gataker, Thomas, 29 gender. See Magisterial Reformation: and patriarchal social order; women: targeted by leaders of Magisterial Reformers Germany, 55, 108, 150

360

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Gilbert, Humphrey, 73 Goffe, William, 286 Gold Coast, West Africa Golding, William, 123 –24 Goodwin, John, 36, 47, 68, 118, 171–72, 196; gathered church of, 125, 127, 155, 178, 180, 181, 201, 211–13, 215; petitions against bishops, 87; political thought of, 114 –18; Samuel How and, 11, 39 – 41, 119. See also Anti-Cavalierism Gorton, Samuel, 6; abolition and, 241, 265, 266, 267, 287; Boston trial of, 121, 147; and the CFP, 122; in Coleman Street Ward, 121–22, 173 –74, 196; conflict with William Coddington, 129 –30; death and remembrance of, 289; evangelizes in New Model Army and provincial England, 175 –77; imprisoned in London, 188; as Leveller, 177; migrates to New England, 129; mission to England, 149 –59; on Native Americans, 153 –54; Newport trial of, 132; and Pawtuxet dispute, 143 – 44; political thought of, 144 –60; sentenced to hard labor, 147, 176, 263; Shawomet and, 120–21, 144, 146 – 47. See also An Incorruptible Key to the CX Psalm; Simplicity’s Defense against a Seven-Headed Policy Gouge, William, 29 Gragg, Larry, 222 Grand Remonstrance, 83, 95 –97 Gravesend, England, 242 Green, John (colonist), 149 Green, John, 171 Grotius, Hugo, 208 Grubb, John, 250 Guinea, West Africa, and slave trade, 262, 265 Guinea Company, 222 Gunpowder Plot, 114 Gurney, Richard, 97 Hadley, Katherine, 106, 118; distributes Lilburne’s pamphlets, 86; freed by House of Lords, 90–91; imprisoned in Poultry Comptor, 86 Hakluyt, Richard (the Younger), 47; and Black Legend, 25; humanist concept of colonization, 20–21; vision of colonization not achieved, 22, 63, 200, 292 Hammond, Henry, 117 Hampden, John, 99

Hampshire, England, 198 Hampton Court, 194 Harrington, James, 255; agrarian law of, 280. See also Oceana Harris, Elizabeth, 287 Harrison, Thomas (minister), 124 Harrison, Thomas (soldier / Fifth Monarchist), 163, 189, 194, 205, 268, 278, 279 Hartford, Connecticut, 129 Harvard College, 289 Haselrigge, Arthur, 99 Hawkins, Jane, 129, 131 Healing Question, A, 202, 256 –57, 278 Hebdon, Return, 37, 41 Helyar, Carl, 243 Henrietta Maria (queen), 99 Hercules, as mythical empire builder, 15 heresiographers, 160 Hertfordshire, England, 163 High Commission, Court of, 34, 36, 40, 60, 89 –90, 183; abolition of, 94 *Hildesley, Mark, 201, 213 –14 Hill, Christopher, 7, 28, 39, 117, 154, 217 Hill, Walter, 13, 14, 15, 215; death of, 24 Hispaniola, 132; and the Western Design, 200, 230, 253, 269, 270 Hiway, Thomas, 223 Hobbes, Thomas, 3, 260 Hobson, Paul, 169, 171 Hodgkin, Roger, 283 Hogarth, William, 175 Holden, Randall, 147, 149 Holles, Denzill, 99, 102, 114 Holstun, James, 33 “honest party,” 188, 202, 277. See also Independents; Presbyterians Hooke, William, 275 Hooker, Thomas, 53, 69, 74, 135; political thought of, 137–38; and transatlantic religious debate, 125 *Hopkins, Edward, 6, 53; Commonwealth naval commissioner, 225; Connecticut governor, 136 –38; keeper of Fleet Prison, 225; migrates to New England, 58, 129; and the United Colonies, 142 House of Commons, 83, 90, 97, 101, 110, 167, 183, 278; Charles I invades, 99; and creation of Commonwealth (Republic), 202; and creation of New Model Army, 165 –66; and fear of revolutionary crowd, 102; and Presbyterian faction, 169; regicide and,

index 202; and Root and Branch Petition debate, 93; Short Parliament and, 87; and Solemn League and Covenant, 165; “war party” of, 165. See also Committee for Examinations; Committee of Foreign Plantations (CFP) House of Lords: abolition of, 101–2, 191, 196; and fear of revolutionary crowd, 102; and the “negative voice” (veto prerogative), 102, 119, 183; and Short Parliament, 87; trial of Maurice Abbot in, 90–91; and unlicensed printing, 105 How, Daniel, 233, 235 How, Samuel, 6, 35, 47, 59, 68, 81, 95, 105, 128, 134, 150, 169, 170, 178, 188, 189, 225, 241, 268, 279, 280; burial of, 89; confrontations with John Goodwin, 11–12, 39 – 42; as contested symbol of reformation, 106 –10, 119, 212; and “human learning” (humanism), 11–12, 39 – 42, 107–9, 185, 281; made iconic by Richard Overton, 107; and Nag’s Head sermon, 11–12, 39 – 40, 47; Samuel Gorton inspired by, 173; William Walwyn exhorts, 212. See also The Sufficiency of the Spirit’s Teaching without Human Learning Hudson Bay Company, 288 humanism (Christian): and Hugo Grotius, 208; and John Winthrop, 54; and Roger Williams, 61; and Thomas More, 54, 61 humanism (English): and the body politic (civil society), 17–18, 23, 185, 187; and colonization, 13, 20–24, 27, 61; and vacuum domicilum, 61. See also colonization humanism (French), 155 –56 Humble Petition of Many Thousand Poor People in and about the City of London, The, 101 Humble Remonstrance, 181 Hutchinson, Anne, 66, 166, 167, 173; attracts antinomian following in Boston, 65 –67; Boston’s First Church excommunicates, 76; English background of, 64; killed with family, 146, 149, 152; as midwife, 64 –65; migrates to New England, 59, 128; and “monster births,” 140, 150; moves to New Netherlands, 144; political thought of, 131–32; tried and banished by Massachusetts General Court, 75 –76 Hypocrisy Unmasked, 151–52 Île de Ré (France), English expedition to, 32 –34

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impressment: and the Anglo-Dutch War, 225 –26; and the armies of Parliament and the King, 116; and the Bishops’ Wars, 88 –89; and the Levellers, 184 –85, 187, 190–94, 196; and the London waterfront, 240– 41, 271–72, 274 –76; and the Petition of Right debates, 31; and the Western Design, 198 –99, 226, 232 –34, 236, 270; and the West Indian garrison, 258 Incorruptible Key to the CX Psalm, An, 176 –77 indentured servitude. See slaveries in the English Atlantic, British and Irish bond slaves Independents: beliefs of, 123; on Bermuda, 123; factions within, 171, 174, 177, 179 –80, 181, 211–13; as a political coalition, 164, 177, 179 –80, 181, 183, 196; purged from City government, 188; as source of heresy, 178; and transatlantic religious debate, 123 –24 Indian Ocean region, English commercial interests in, 17. See also East India Company Instrument of Government Act, and the “negative voice, “ 228 inward/outward bondage, 198, 255, 256, 257, 266 –67, 279, 281, 287–88 Ireland, 84, 87, 119, 198; Commonwealth conquest of, 203, 206 –10, 232, 237–38, 250, 259 –60, 265, 291; death toll of Commonwealth conquest of, 209; Down Survey of, 260; Drogheda massacre in, 207–8, 232; Elizabethan and Jacobean colonization of, 19, 53, 61–62, 63, 73, 74, 206, 208; and English political economy of empire, 259 –60; kidnappers and, 244; as part of the English Atlantic, 4, 201; projected 1647 conquest of, 188 –89, 216 –19; Protestants of, 96, 203; Wexford massacre in, 207–8 Ireton, Henry, 192 –93, 196, 209, 210 Irish Adventurers, 205 Irish Catholics, 294; as “common enemy,” 203, 257; English views of, 19, 96, 202 –3, 209; and Quakers, 250–51; settlement overture to English Commonwealth, 206; and tories, 208 –9, 215, 216, 219, 230, 234, 238; transplantation of, 216, 218, 238, 250; transported into colonial bond slavery, 119, 210, 215, 216, 219, 232, 235, 238, 250, 261–62; in the West Indies

362

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Irish Catholics (continued) 235 –36. See also colonization: and English views of savagery and civility Irish Rebellion of 1641, 95 –96, 202 – 4, 206 –7, 209; as colonial frontier war, 96; and propaganda, 96, 101 I.S., 200, 270 Isle of Wight, 199 Italy, 288 Ives, Jeremiah, 175, 189, 194 –95 Jackson, William, 26 Jacob, Henry, 170 Jamaica, 8; maroon colonies of, 200, 248; mortality on, 259; slavery on, 248, 294; and Western Design, 200, 236 –37, 251–52 James I, foreign policies of, 25 James, Thomas, 24 Japan, 17 Jessey, Henry, 94, 170, 173 J.F., 258 –59 John, 250 John of Leyden, 108, 150 Johnson, Edward, 120–21, 147 Jones, John, 270 Jones, Susan, 272 Joyce, George, 189 Juan, 250 Just Man’s Justification, The, 181 Kent, England, 175 Key into the Language of America, A, 154 –59 Keyser, Thomas, 262 –63 Keys of the Kingdom, The, 125 kidnappers, crowd resists, 240– 41, 243, 243. See also man-stealers; spirits Kiffin, William, 29, 188, 211–12 Kilkenny, Ireland, 207, 250 King Jesus, 117, 145, 171, 173, 176, 186, 227–28, 254, 275, 280, 282 Kingston upon Thames, England, 33 Knollys, Hanserd, 6, 166, 171, 173, 180, 181, 188, 196, 216 Knowles, John, 124 Kupperman, Karen, 51–52 *Lacy, Daniel, 91, 118, 213 –14 Lambe, John, 7; killed, 32; satirized, 34 Lambe, Thomas, 89; Coleman Street Ward church of, 121, 155, 173, 174 –76; and the Levellers, 174, 177, 180, 188, 194

Lambert, John, 228, 278 Larner, William, 100, 101, 102 Lathrop, John, 59 La Tour, Charles, 141– 42 Laud, William, 27, 28, 30, 125, 220; appointed archbishop of Canterbury, 34; attacked at Lambeth Palace, 86, 88 –89; imprisoned in the Tower of London, 92; and persecution of puritans, 35 –36, 84, 128; seventeen canons of 1640 and, 87 Lawrence, 250 Lawson, John, 225 Lenthall, John, 207 Letter to the Apprentices, A, 86 Levant Company, 213 Levellers, 106, 155, 211–12, 237; and atrocities in Ireland, 209; and Fifth Monarchists, 268; and impressment, 184 –85, 187, 190–94, 196; imprisoned, 188, 211; and invasion of Ireland (1649), 203 –5; New Englanders as, 163, 196, 205; and the New Model Army, 163 –64, 189 –95, 204 –5; as an organization, 195; and petitioning, 180–82, 188, 194, 195, 196, 204; political thought of, 179, 181–87; practical Christianity of, 165, 179, 184 –87, 191, 192, 196, 211, 238; republican program of, 181–84, 186 –87; as revolutionaries, 186 –87; rise of, 179 –82, 190–91, 196; and social justice, 186 –88, 211, 238; as soldiers, 188; and villeiny, 186 –87. See also An Agreement of the People; Overton, Richard: and Coleman Street Ward underground press; Putney Debates; A Remonstrance of Many Thousands Lewes, Thomas, 250 liberty of conscience, 122, 131, 132 –34, 164, 165 –66, 179, 196; linked to bodily liberty, 175, 191–92, 266 –67; linked to freedom of the press, 183; and social justice, 211. See also religious toleration Ligon, Richard, 246, 246 – 47 Lilburne, John, 29, 34, 35, 89, 118, 173, 190, 196; and the “anti-petition,” 167; imprisoned, 86, 181; opposes Bishops’ Wars, 86; as Parliamentary soldier, 166; petitioning and rise of Levellers, 180–82; political thought of, 168 –69, 186 –87; regicide and, 195; and revolutionary crowd, 83 –84, 98; tortured in Fleet Prison, 86; and Ware mutiny, 194; and work with Katherine Hadley, 86, 90–91, 106

index Lilburne, Robert, 189, 194 Lincolnshire, England, 20, 64, 175 Linebaugh, Peter, 8, 15, 224, 247 Lockyer, Robert, 204 London: City government, 23 –24, 103, 167, 178, 188, 201, 211, 214, 273; crowd and outbreak of the English Revolution, 97–102; impoverished population, 13 –15, 17, 23 –24; militia, 97, 100, 114, 214, 276; overcrowding in, 14, 15; population growth, 13; waterfront as center of imperial slave system, 274. See also Coleman Street Ward London, East End, 97, 180, 240, 271, 286; Billingsgate, 84, 268; Katherine’s Stairs, 240, 271, 279; Spital, 170; Stepney, 170; St. Katherine’s Dock, 271, 273; Wapping, 87 London, places: Finsbury Fields, 166; Guildhall, 85, 250; Highgate, 282; Moorfields (residential area), 35, 40, 105, 106, 169, 171; Southwark, 94, 180, 279; St. Giles in the Fields, 278; Tower Hill, 93, 226, 236, 272; Tower of London, 88, 240– 41, 268, 272; Turnham Green, 114; Tyburn, 240. See also London, East End London, prisons and jails, 37; Bridewell, 23, 24, 88, 211, 233; Clink, 36; Fleet, 35, 37, 86, 89, 225; the Gatehouse, 37, 287; Newgate, 37, 86, 89, 98, 190, 240, 283; Poultry Comptor, 37, 86; Winchester, 215; Wood Street Comptor, 37, 94, 98, 282 London, streets: Charing Cross Road, 97, 149; Cheapside, 98, 172, 283; Checker Alley, 169; Fleet Street, 171; Katherine’s Lane, 241; Poultry Street, 282; Seething Lane, 282; Threadneedle Street, 283; Wood Street, 282, 283 Long Parliament, 118; calling of, 90, 114, 116; and colonial transportation of bond slaves, 215; and monarchy, 195; and New Model Army, 189; news of reforms reaches New England, 126; purged by New Model Army, 195; “war party” in, 150 Lucar, Mark, 128, 171 Ludlow, Edmund, 209 MacDonnell, Randal (marquis of Antrim), 206 Mad Fashions, Odd Fashions, All of Fashion, 108, 110 Madeira, and wine/slave trade, 262

363

Magisterial Reformation, in England, 149 – 60. See also English Atlantic: RadicalMagisterial Reformation conflict Magisterial Reformation, in New England, 47, 59; “common enemies” (Indians and antinomians) of, 77, 81, 142, 149; and formation of United Colonies, 142 – 43; and patriarchal social order, 65, 67–68, 77, 81–82, 140; politics of, 60–61, 63, 75 –78, 122, 142, 144 –60; and practical Christianity, 82. See also English Atlantic: Radical/ Magisterial Reformation conflict Magna Carta, 19, 30, 112, 168. See also ancient constitution “malignant party,” 101, 107. See also royalists Mammot, Gilbert, 233 Mandingo people, 223 man-stealers, 242, 262, 278. See also kidnappers; spirits Many-Headed Hydra, The, 224 Marley, Bob, 1, 8 Marprelate tracts, 181 Maryland: bond slavery in, 242 – 45, 287; and Ingle’s Rebellion, 127; royalists in, 219 Mason, John, 45, 72 Massachusetts: and allegiance during the English Revolution, 125 –27; and Body of Liberties, 139 – 40, 159, 260–62; bond slavery in, 55, 261–62; and debates over charter, 60–63, 125, 134 –35; elections of 1637, 72; establishment and settlement of, 52 –53, 57–58; as “free state,” 126; General Court, 68, 71, 72, 75 –76, 103, 121, 135, 140, 145 – 47, 159, 178, 261–62, 288 –89; justifications for colonization, 53 –57; and the La Tour affair, 141– 42; militia of, 45 – 46, 72 –73, 120–21, 146 – 47, 263; and Mosaic Judicials, 138 – 40, 262; and Narragansett Bay, 143 – 44; and Native American evangelization, 79, 290; and piracy, 80, 141– 42; as a “popular state,” 133; Quakers executed in, 288 –89; and Rhode Island, 122; seal of, 152; and slave trade, 77, 82, 262 –63; Standing Council of, 70–71, 139 – 42, 146, 159, 263; and the United Colonies, 142 – 43. See also Boston, Massachusetts; colonization; Narragansett Indians; New England; Pequot War; Rhode Island Massachusetts Bay Company, 52 –53 Massasoit, 63

364

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Mediterranean region: English commercial interests in, 17, 22; and English imperial ambitions, 217; and Quaker evangelism, 287–88 Mendi people, 223 mercenaries, 83, 115; principles of, 190, 192, 203, 253 –56 Merchant Adventurers Company, 213 Mercurius Politicus, 252 Miantanomo: Indian confederacy built by, 143, 152, 159; murdered, 143 – 44, 146; Rhode Island sold by, 128; Shawomet sold by, 144 Michael the archangel, 270 “middling sort,” 67, 98, 103 migration. See English Atlantic Militia Bill, 102 –3, 142 Milton, John, 173, 183, 201, 230, 255, 256, 257. See also Areopagetica; Eikonklastes; Paradise Lost Minehead, England, 208 Model of Christian Charity, 56 –57, 68 Moderate, The, 195 Moderate Intelligencer, The, 204 Mohegan Indians, 72; and murder of Miantanomo, 143; and the United Colonies, 142 – 43 Moloch, 145 Monck, George, 278, 282 monsters: democracy as, 140, 151; hydras, 98, 205, 276; Levellers as, 205; “monster births,” 140, 150; New Model Army as, 168; patriarchal inversion as, 140; Protectorate governments as “blood monsters,” 239, 271; toleration as, 168, 170; war as, 290 Montagu, Edward (earl of Manchester), 166 Montaigne, George, 28 Montaigne, Michel de, 155, 250 Montserrat, 219; and Western Design, 233 Moorfields (park). See under Coleman Street Ward, places Moorfields (residential area). See under London, places More, Thomas, 54, 61 Morrill, John, 111 Mosaic Code: and Fifth Monarchist program, 227, 279 –81; man-stealing prohibited by, 262 –63; in New England, 129 –30, 138 – 40, 227, 262 –63; and Nominated Assembly, 227–28; and social justice, 130,

228; and transatlantic republicanism, 227. See under apocalyptic belief M.S. to A.S, 178 Munster, Germany, 108, 150 Munster, Ireland, 205, 206 Murfy, Coll., 235 Mystic River, 45 Nansemond County, Virginia, 124 Narragansett Bay, 120, 128, 149, 159, 291 Narragansett Indians, 63, 64, 72 –73, 74, 267, 128; CFP and, 151–53; King Phillip’s War and, 290; Pawtuxet dispute and, 143 – 44; and Rhode Island colonists, 147, 149, 290–91; Shawomet and, 120–21; United Colonies and, 142 – 44, 159 Nash, Colonel, 209 Natick Indians, 290 Native Americans: and intercolonial relations in New England, 142 –60; as part of Atlantic commonality, 238; and politics of the English Revolution, 152 –53; “praying Indians,” 290; and puritan plans for evangelization, 58, 154; and the “racialization of savagery,” 73 –74, 82, 136 –37, 151, 152, 157; and small pox epidemic in New England, 62 –63; supply colonists with food, 62. See also colonization: and English views of savagery and civility; Mohegan Indians; Narragansett Indians; New England; Pequot Indians; Powhattan Indians; puritans; Siwanoy Indians; slaveries in the English Atlantic, Native Americans perpetually enslaved; Wampanoag Indians Navigation Act, 26, 221–22, 233, 234, 237, 238 navy (of the English Commonwealth): and Anglo-Dutch War, 224 –26; mutinies of, 201; New Englanders and, 224 –26, 237; and the Western Design, 198 –200, 232 –34. See also press gang Nedham, Marchamont, 252 –53 Nevis, and Western Design, 233 New England: and bond slavery, 260–62; colonization of, as exceptional in the English Atlantic, 47– 48; and the English Revolution, 2 –3, 121–22, 125 –27, 219 –20; Half-Way Covenant, 286; King Phillip’s War, 290; migration to, 46 – 47; and Native American / intercolonial relations,

index 142 –60, 291; Quakers in, 288 –89; and the “racialization of savagery,” 73 –74, 82, 136 –37, 157; as site of constitutional revolutions, 46, 128, 129 – 43; and slavery / slave trading, 77, 82, 150–51, 262 –63, 274; and transatlantic religious debate, 122 –24, 140, 150–51; and Western Design, 230. See also Boston, Massachusetts; colonization; Connecticut; Connecticut River Valley; Magisterial Reformation, in New England; Massachusetts; New Haven; Plymouth; puritans; Radical Reformation, in New England; Rhode Island; United Colonies New England’s First Fruits, 125 New Haven, 129; Fundamental Orders of, 138 –39; and Mosaic Judicials, 138; and regicides, 286; and the United Colonies, 142 – 43 *Newman, Robert, 138 New Model Army: agitators elected, 189; apocalyptic beliefs of, 227; atrocities in Ireland, 207–10; created, 165; Fifth Monarchists and, 268; impressment and, 189 –90, 232 –34; Irish conquest and, 203 – 4, 203 –10, 217; Levellers in, 189 –95, 204 –5; mutinies of, 163 –64, 194 –95, 204 –5, 208; New Englanders in, 163 –64, 189, 205; petitioning by, 189 –90; politics of generals, 195; portrayed as a monster, 168; purges Presbyterian officers, 189; religious toleration and, 166; revolutionary politics and, 1, 68 –70, 189 –97, 254, 258 –59; soldiers as spirits, 250, 259. See also An Agreement of the People; Levellers; Putney Debates; A Representation of the Army; A Solemn Engagement of the Army New Netherlands, 104, 144, 146. See also Dutch Newport, Rhode Island, 131 Newport Pagnell, England, 169 Newtown, Massachusetts, 58, 65, 71, 72 Nichols, Francis, 189 *Noell, Martin: and bond slave trade debate, 277–78; death of, 286; as financier, 213; Irish interests of, 218 –19, 239 – 40; knighted by Charles II, 286; as military contractor, 216, 239; offices held by, 215 –16, 239 – 40; political influence of, 220, 222, 229, 239 – 40, 270; provisions Western Design, 234, 272; as slave

365

trader, 214 –15, 237, 239 – 40, 258, 277–78, 286; West Indian interests of, 218 –19, 239 – 40 Nominated Assembly, 226 –28; apocalyptic beliefs and reform efforts, 227–28, 238 Norfolk, England, 176; village of Lynn, 175 Norman Yoke, as intellectual inheritance in popular politics, 165, 169, 182 –83. See also political slavery Northamptonshire, England, 88, 169 Oates, Samuel, 174, 175, 194 Oceana, 255, 256 Okey, John, 205 Old Bailey, 1, 172 Oldham, John, 71 Ó Néill, Eoghan Ruadh, 205 Opecanhanough, 24, 207 Overton, Henry, 111, 125 Overton, Mary, 188 Overton, Richard, 7, 115, 118; and Coleman Street Ward underground press, 83, 85, 104 –7, 111–14, 118 –19, 181–82, 196; and the iconography of Samuel How, 107; imprisoned, 188, 190, 211; as member of Thomas Lambe’s Coleman Street Ward church, 174; political thought of, 181–87; and rise of the Levellers, 180–81. See also The Arraignment of Mr. Persecution Oxenbridge, John, 49 Oxfordshire, England, 88; and Burford mutiny, 205 Paige, John, 232 –33 Paradise Lost, 255 Parker, Henry, 102 –3, 117 Parliament. See House of Commons; House of Lords Parsons, William, 287 Patient, Thomas, 171, 173, 180, 196; imprisoned, 188 Peasants’ War (Germany), 55 Penn, William, 233, 236, 251 *Pennington, Isaac, 35, 36, 53, 83, 85, 103, 114 –15, 176, 188, 213 –14; death of, 286; and escape of the Five Members, 99; and the Grand Remonstrance, 96 –97; imprisoned, 279; and Presbyterian Parliamentary faction, 167; as prominent Parliamentarian, 91, 118; prosecutes John Taylor, 110; and regicide, 201; and the Root and

366

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*Pennington, Isaac (continued) Branch Petition, 92 –93, 96 –97; and “war party,” 165 Pennington, Isaac, Jr., 178 Pennington, Mary, 115 Penniston, Anthony, 127, 250 Pennoyer, William, 214 Pepys, Samuel, 2, 282 Pequot Indians, 45 – 46, 64, 208; as “common enemy,” 75, 77, 82, 150–51; and “curse of Ham,” 73; enslavement of, 73 –74, 136 –37, 149; fur trade and, 69; and political slavery, 136 –37, 158 Pequot War, 103, 145, 153, 209, 210; alliance between Massachusetts, Plymouth, and Connecticut settlers, 72; and Antinomian Controversy, 63 –64; and Ft. Mystic massacre, 45 – 46, 72 –73, 208; Irish colonization parallels with, 73; and Massachusetts’s demands on Pequots, 69 –70, 71; Treaty of Hartford and, 136 –37 Perrot, John, 250–51, 287–88 Pessicus, 147, 149 Pestana, Carla Gardina, 5, 128, 243 Peter, Hugh, 19; and Anna Trapnell, 173; confronts Thomas Edwards, 167; and Dutch exile, 53; and excommunication of Anne Hutchinson, 76; executed, 279; migrates to Massachusetts, 70; as New Model Army chaplain, 166 –67; at the Putney Debates, 193; returns to England, 150; work with feoffees of impropriation, 29 petitioning, 19, 178, 210–11; as ancient constitutional liberty, 130; Antinomian Controversy and, 71, 75 –76; bond slave trade and, 272, 277–78, 290; Levellers and, 180–82, 188, 194, 195, 196; and outbreak of English Revolution, 83 –85, 87, 92 –94, 96 –97, 101–2, 118, 168, 183; prison conditions and, 282. See also Grand Remonstrance; Independents; Petition of Right; Presbyterians; A Remonstrance of Many Thousands; Root and Branch Petition Petition of Right, 7, 60, 91; and impressment, 31; Parliament debates, 30–31, 84, 87; popular politics and, 31–34, 135, 168, 204 Petty, William, 260, 292 Picture of a New Courtier, The, 270 Pierce, William, 70 pirates, 26, 49, 50, 52, 80, 132, 215. See also

Providence Island; slave trades in the English Atlantic; Tortuga; West Indies: English imperial ambitions in plague (of 1665 –1666), 286 Plantation Act, 216, 220 plantation empire, English Empire as, 223, 260, 292 plantations, 246, 250; and capitalism, 260, 292; unfree labor regime of, 242; violence on, 259. See also sugar; tobacco Plentherto, 250 Plymouth (New England colony), 29, 59, 70, 129; and the United Colonies, 142 – 43 political anatomy, 260. See also political economy of empire political arithmetic, 260. See also political economy of empire political economy of empire, 18 –19, 221–23, 234, 259, 267, 274, 278, 292 political labor: and abolition, 237; and Coleman Street Ward underground printing press, 104, 113, 119; and Levellers, 187–88, 191–94; of Roger Williams with the Narragansetts, 157–58 political slavery, 77, 112, 181, 263; and economic slavery, 119, 158, 222 –24, 238, 240, 263 –67, 269 –72, 274 –76, 293; impressment as, 184 –85, 196; Levellers and, 182 –84, 185, 187, 193 –94, 196; Navigation Acts as, 222 –24, 238; New England antinomians and, 146, 147, 152; of Pequot Indians, 136 –37; Presbyterian constitutional settlement as, 167, 169, 182; and Western Design, 253 –55. See also Norman Yoke; republicanism Pomham, 120, 144, 147, 149 Poor Unhappy Transported Felon, The, 250 Pope’s Head Alley, 114 “popish plot”: and the Grand Remonstrance, 95; and the Protestation, 94 Portman, John, 269, 275 Portsmouth, England, 33, 198, 250, 272 Portsmouth, Rhode Island, 129 –32, 158, 263, 265 Powell, Vavassor, 268 –69 Powhattan Indians, 24, 124, 207 practical Christianity, 257; abolition and, 267, 287; of the Fifth Monarchists and, 279 –81; of the Levellers, 165, 179, 184 –87, 191, 192, 196, 238; New England colonization and, 48, 56 –57, 61–63, 68,

index 82, 136 –37, 157; of the Quakers, 251, 287. See also republicanism: and social and economic justice; royal law Presbyterians, 159, 178, 277; beliefs of, 123; Commonwealth and, 202; City government and, 167, 188, 214; as a Parliamentary political faction, 169, 179, 181, 188 –90; and petitioning, 167, 181, 188; Pride’s Purge and, 195; in Scotland, 85; Solemn League and Covenant and, 165 –66. See also Edwards, Thomas; Prynne, William press gang, 175, 193, 197; and the Bishops’ Wars, 88; crowd resists, 240, 272, 274; and the London waterfront, 272, 274; Long Parliament uses, 184 –85; and the Western Design, 233, 270 Pretty, Henry, 175, 189 *Price, John, 180, 21, 213 –14. See also Walwyn’s Wiles *Price, Richard, 155, 213 –14 Pride, Thomas, and purge of Long Parliament, 195 Prince, Thomas, 211 print culture, 104, 123 –25, 142, 150–51, 157–58, 204, 270–71, 294 printing press. See Overton, Richard: Coleman Street Ward underground press prisons. See London, prisons and jails Privy Council, 23, 27, 67, 70, 90, 114 Protectorate governments, 241; called “blood monsters,” 239, 271; condemned by James Harrington and John Milton, 255; and decimation, 251; and Fifth Monarchy movement, 269 –72, 74 –76; Instrument of Government Act establishes, 228; parliaments of, 215, 256, 269; political crises of, 277; and the sin of Achan, 255 –57. See also Commonwealth of England; Council of State; Fifth Monarchists; Western Design Protestant Reformation, as main end of political reform and revolution, 115, 121, 133, 241. See also apocalyptic belief; colonization; Magisterial Reformation; Radical Reformation Protestation, 93 –94 Providence, Rhode Island, 63, 149, 263; civil compact of, 131 Providence Island: colonization of, 46, 49 –52; as first slave society in the English

367

Atlantic, 50–52; Pequot Indians enslaved on, 74, 136; piratical slave trade and, 50–52, 80–81; Spanish destroy, 81, 141 Providence Island Company, 50, 51, 87, 95, 154, 214, 234; compared with Massachusetts Bay Company, 52 Prynne, William, 34, 35, 106, 123, 180–81 puritans: Calvinism of, 27–28, 36, 64; and church and civil (commonwealth) constitutions, 29 –30, 137–39; and colonization of New England, 48, 56 –57; and covenant of grace (or free grace), 37–38, 64 –65; and Dutch exile, 35, 53, 70; import of, in New England, 46 – 47; Laudian persecution of, 35 –36; “legalism” of clergy, 38, 41, 176; and the New England Way, 47, 82, 142, 146; opposition to English church under James I, 28 –29; orthodoxy, defined against sedition and savagery, 82; and persecution of antinomians in London, 36 –37, 39 – 42; on Providence Island, 46, 49 –52; relationship with lay preaching, 39 – 40, 41; in Virginia, 124. See also antinomianism; liberty of conscience; Magisterial Reformation; practical Christianity; Radical Reformation Putney Debates, 163, 190–94 Pym, John, 103, 150; and Coleman Street Ward revolutionaries, 91; Henry Vane and, 91; Long Parliament and, 95; Petition of Right debates and, 31; Providence Island Company and, 50, 52; Short Parliament and, 87; slavery and, 52 Quakers, 178; divide over slavery, 287; global evangelism of, 287–90; and Irish Catholics, 250–51, 287–88; Massachusetts executes, 288 –89 race. See colonization: construction of racial hierarchy Radical Reformation, in England: as anarchy, 173; and New Model Army, 165 –66; politics of, 149 –60; as the Revolution’s main end, 85, 188. See also English Atlantic: Radical/Magisterial Reformation conflict Radical Reformation, in New England, 47, 59, 81–82, 120; politics of, 63, 78 –80, 121–22, 130–34, 137–38, 144 –60. See also English Atlantic: Radical-Magisterial Reformation conflict

368

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Rainbow, 262 Rainsborough, Thomas: assassination of, 204 –5; at Putney Debates, 193 –94; regiment of, 166, 208; and Ware mutiny, 163, 194 Rainsborough, William, 163, 189, 192, 196, 205, 218 Rainsborough, William, Sr., 224 Raleigh, Walter, 26 “red Atlantic,” 238 Rediker, Marcus, 8, 15, 224, 247 Redshanks. See under Scots regicides, 201–2, 279, 286, 289 Reilly, Edmund, 206 religious toleration, 122, 123, 131–34, 165 –67, 290; portrayed as monster, 168, 170, 178 –79, 183. See also liberty of conscience Remonstrance of Many Thousands, A, details Leveller program, 181–84, 190 Representation of the Army, A, 190 republicanism: and New England constitutional revolutions, 129 –34, 158; and social and economic justice, 186 –88, 197, 211, 228, 238, 280, 291. See also Coleman Street Ward: center for republican political organization; commonality; political slavery republicanism, in England: and duke of Buckingham’s assassination, 33; and a “free state,” 1, 164, 179, 183, 187, 255, 280; and Gerrard Winstanley, 280; and humanism, 291–92; James Harrington and, 255, 280; John Goodwin and, 115 –18; John Milton and, 255, 256; and the Levellers, 181–97; and the New Model Army, 1, 189 –97, 205; and popular politics, 164 –65, 168 –69, 213, 227, 327n8; self-interest as “common enemy” of, 256 republicanism, transatlantic: and abolition, 241, 266, 287, 293 –94; and Fifth Monarchists, 264, 269 –72, 274 –76, 291; and material equity, 290; and Mosaic Judicials, 227; and practical Christianity, 291; and religious toleration, 290–91; and violence of imperial expansion, 293 Restoration, 278, 286 Retired Man’s Meditations, The, 202 Revel, James, 240– 41, 242, 248, 250, 258. See also The Poor Unhappy Transported Felon

Rhode Island, 122; abolition law of, 265 –67, 285, 293; antinomians converge on, 128 –29; and charter missions to London, 122, 144, 149 –59, 264, 285, 287; colonists ally with Narragansett Indians, 147, 149; constitutional revolutions (1639 –1641, 1647) and, 85, 129 –34, 158, 168, 263 –64; democracy in, 132 –33, 159, 264; and Pawtuxet dispute, 143 – 45, 151, 153; and Portsmouth Compact (1638, 1639, 1641), 129 –33; religious toleration in, 131–33; settlements consolidated into one colony, 144, 263 –64; slavery, slave trading, and bond slavery, 230, 264 –67; and the United Colonies, 142 – 43. See also Coddington, William; Gorton, Samuel; political slavery; Shawomet; Vane, Henry; Williams, Roger Rich, Robert (first earl of Warwick), 26 Rich, Robert (second earl of Warwick), 17, 70, 118; Bermuda investment and, 26, 49, 220; CFP and, 121, 159; and Cromwell’s installation as Lord Protector, 228; English West India Company and, 49; piracy and, 26, 127; Providence Island and, 50; Short Parliament and, 87 Right and Might Well Met, 201 River Gambia, 223 River Thames, 97, 99, 240, 242 Robinson, John, 137 Robinson, William, 288 –89 Robin the Devil, 188 Rogers, John, 227, 268 Roman Catholics. See Irish Catholics; Spain Root and Branch Petition, 83 –84, 92 –93 *Rowe, Owen, 29, 49, 53, 58, 103, 118; death of, 286; deputy governor of Bermuda Company, 220; imprisoned, 279; as merchant revolutionary, 213 –14, 218; and piracy in Bermuda, 220; as regicide, 201; trained bands officer, 114 Rowlandson, Thomas, 175 Rous, Francis, 79 Royal Exchange, 114 royalists, 119; and assassination of Thomas Rainsborough, 204 –5; colonial transportation of, 215; in the colonies, 219 –21, 222; as “common enemy,” 257; in Ireland, 206; petition against bond slavery, 277–78; and Radical Reformation, 107–10

index royal law, 57–58, 185 –86, 254, 274, 279, 280. See also practical Christianity Rump Parliament: Anglo-Dutch war, 225; and Ayescue and Denis fleets, 220–21; and bond slaves’ colonial transportation, 215, 216; Coleman Street Ward merchant revolutionaries and, 237; dissolved, 228; and English economic crisis, 211; imperial legislation of, 216, 218, 220; Irish conquest and, 203, 217–18 *Russell, James, 49, 103, 118; as merchant revolutionary, 213 –14, 218 Rutherford, Samuel, 173 –74 sailors: abuse of, 225; and assassination of the duke of Buckingham, 33; and assassination of John Lambe, 32; Atlantic commonality and, 238; and opposition to Bishops’ Wars, 88; and outbreak of English Revolution, 83; resist press gangs, 240– 41, 272 –74; riot on Tower Hill, 226; and Western Design, 232 Saints’ Interest in God, The, 114 Salem, Massachusetts, 58, 59, 60, 70; witch trials, 287 Salters’ Hall, 180 Saltmarsh, John, 172 –73, 174, 175, 180, 194 –95 Saltonstall, Richard, Jr., 7, 58, 160; and Atlantic career of, 289; political thought of, 139 – 42; and slave trade protest, 262 –63 *Saltonstall, (Sir) Richard, Sr., 53, 58, 69, 135, 139 Salvador, 250 Samuel, 250 Sandys, Edwin, 26 Saugus, Massachusetts, 261 Saybrook Company, 69 –70 Scotland, 83 –84, 265; and Charles II, 219, 227; and English Atlantic, 4; New Model Army (Musselburgh 1650) declaration, 227, 254. See also Bishops’ Wars Scots: colonial transportation of, 215, 261; Covenanters, 86, 90, 125; as Redshanks, 31; and Solemn League and Covenant, 165 Scroope, Adrian, 205 Sedgewick, Robert, 248 Seeley, Robert, 45 – 46, 69, 135, 137, 138 –39 Selleck, David, 261–62 Selling of Joseph, The, 287

369

Senegambia, 223 servant trade. See slave trades in the English Atlantic, in bond slaves from Britain and Ireland Sessicus, 144 Sewall, Samuel, 287 Sexby, Edward, 193 Shakespeare, William, 26 Sharpe, Sarah, 272 Shaw, Peter, 36 Shawnee Indians, 294 Shawomet, 144; attacked, 120–21, 146 – 47, 148, 208, 263, 289; renamed Warwick, 263 Sheffield, Thomas, 189 Shepard, Thomas, 65, 68, 71, 76, 77, 289 Sherrard, Hope, 51, 52 Short Parliament, 86 –87 Short Story of the Rise, Reign, and Ruin of the Antinomians, A, 150–51 Sidney, Algernon, 202 Sidney, Henry, 73 Simplicity’s Defense against a Seven-Headed Policy, 151–53, 177 Simpson, John, 268; church breaks up, 269 sin of Achan: as “the accursed thing,” 212, 256, 257, 271, 279, 290, 294; and the duke of Buckingham (Île de Ré expedition), 34, 256; and Fifth Monarchists, 269, 271, 275, 279 –81; and Irish conquest, 212; and the Western Design, 255 –57, 269, 271 Siwanoy Indians, 146, 149 Skelton, Samuel, 58, 59 Skinner, Quentin, 117 Skippon, Phillip, 99 slaveries in the English Atlantic: relations between bond/African slaves, 248 –50; “terrible transformation” to racialized slavery, 241. See also political slavery: and economic slavery slaveries in the English Atlantic, Africans perpetually enslaved, 119, 230, 292 –94; and Atlantic commonality, 238; on Barbados, 246, 248; Chesapeake, 240– 41; and “curse of Ham,” 73, 287; escape by boat, 52, 235; exceptionalism of, 247– 48; first introduced to future United States, 26; on Jamaica, 248; in New England, 48, 136 –37; on Providence Island, 52;

370

index

slaveries in the English Atlantic (continued) rebellions of, 8, 201, 238; in Rhode Island, 264 –67; running away, 223; in the West Indies, 235 –36, 265. See also Barbados; Bermuda; Connecticut; Jamaica; Maryland; Massachusetts; Montserrat; New Haven; Rhode Island; St. Kitts; Virginia slaveries in the English Atlantic, British and Irish bond slaves, 219, 233, 276, 292 –94; on Barbados, 223 –24, 248, 261; on Bermuda, 223 –24; chattel condition of, 245 – 47; in the Chesapeake, 24, 240– 41; colonial law and, 245, 246, 247, 266; condition distinct from English apprenticeship and service, 245 – 47; condition distinct from racialized slavery, 242, 245 – 47; contracts, 244 – 46, 261–62; in England, 250; escape by boat, 52, 235, 250; labor discipline of, 24, 52, 259; in Maryland, 242 – 45; in Massachusetts, 55, 261–62; mortality of, 246; Quakers protect, 287–88; rebellions of, 24, 201, 223, 238; in Virginia, 24, 52, 55, 62 –63, 250; in the West Indies, 235 –36, 245 slaveries in the English Atlantic, Native Americans perpetually enslaved, 119, 292; on Barbados, 246; in New England, 73 –74, 136 –37; on Providence Island, 52 slave societies: and Barbados, 219 –20; in the English Atlantic, 241, 264; and Providence Island, 50–52 slave trades in the English Atlantic, in Africans, 136 –37, 214, 216 –17, 220, 222 –23, 232, 234, 237, 238; piracy and, 26 –27, 46, 50–52, 240– 41, 262, 265 –67, 280–81, 287, 292 –94 slave trades in the English Atlantic, in bond slaves from Britain and Ireland: and head right system, 245; private, 23 –24, 240– 41, 242 – 45 (see also kidnappers; man-stealers; spirits); state, 23 –24, 119, 210, 211, 214 –15, 216, 217, 219, 225, 230, 235, 237, 238, 240, 258 –60, 261–62, 270–72, 274 –76, 277–78, 280–81, 292 –94 Smith, James, 262 –63 Smith, Thomas, and De Republica Anglorum, 18, 54, 113, 187; and Irish colonization, 19; slavery statute of 1547 and, 18 social and economic justice. See under republicanism

soldiers: and Atlantic commonality, 238; feared as armed commonality, 31; fear impressment will lead to colonial enslavement, 88, 199, 233; iconoclasm of, 89; impressment of, leads to colonial enslavement, 200, 259; oppose Bishops’ Wars, 88 –89; and outbreak of English Revolution, 83. See also New Model Army Solemn Engagement of the Army, A, 190 Southampton, England, 251 Southwark. See under London, places Spain, 13, 17, 226; and the Black Legend, 25, 48, 153, 230, 252; as “common enemy” of the English, 229, 257; as target of early English colonization efforts, 47– 48, 51, 95. See also West Indies Spenser, Edmund, 19 spirits: crowds confront, 271–72, 278; impressment and, 259; and the London waterfront, 271–72; as main suppliers of private bond slave trade, 242 – 43; as metaphor for enslavers of the body politic, 275; petitions against, 272, 277–78, 290; target children, 242 – 43 *Spurstowe, William, 29, 53, 58, 150 Staffe, William, 278 Stagg, Sister, 173, 174 Star Chamber, Court of, 34, 35, 60, 183; abolition of, 94 Stephenson, Marmaduke, 288 Stiles, Ezra St. Kitts, 80, 128 –29; royalists in, 219; and Western Design, 233 Stone, John, 69, 71 Stoughton, Israel: as Massachusetts colonist, 134; as soldier in Parliamentary army, 166 St. Paul’s Cathedral, 1; riot against High Commission, 89 –90; and Venner’s 1661 rising, 281 Strode, William, 99 St. Stephen’s parish. See under Coleman Street Ward, places Stuart, James (duke of York), 286 Sufficiency of the Spirit’s Teaching without Human Learning, The, 106; publication history of, 42, 268 Suffolk, England, 14 sugar: and English Empire, 223; plantations and planters, 248, 249, 260; and West Indian colonies, 213 Surrey, England, 175

index Sussex, England, 175 Swarm of Sectaries and Schismatics, A, 108, 109 Symonds, Samuel, 261 taxes: as grievance in the Protestation, 94; as grievance in the Root and Branch Petition, 93 *Taylor, Daniel, 201, 213 –14 Taylor, John, attacked in Coleman Street Ward, 110; and Samuel How, 107–10, 150. See also A Swarm of Sectaries and Schismatics terrorism: colonization and empire building, 206 –10, 292; and political dissent, 205; and slavery, 248, 292 Tew, Nicholas, 188 Thirty Years’ War, 25, 70, 74, 99 Thomason, George, 1 Thomson, Maurice, 80, 213, 215, 216, 220, 221–23, 229, 269 Thomson, Robert, 80 Thomson, William, 205 Thurloe, John, 270 Tillam, Thomas, 171, 191 Tinker, John, 125 –26 tobacco, 245; and Barbados, 55 –56, 250; and Bermuda, 220; and Coleman Street Ward merchants, 127, 214; and early Virginia economy, 22 –23; and expanding cultivation of, in Chesapeake, 48, 214, 221; plantations and planters, 53 –56, 240, 242, 260; and Providence Island, 50 Tomlins, Christopher, 258 Tompson, William, 124 tories. See under Irish Catholics Tortuga, as maroon colony / buccaneer commonwealth, 52, 132 Tower Hill. See under London, places Tower of London. See under London, places Trapnell, Anna, 173 Traske, John, 37 Trinidad, 171 Tucker, William, 207 Turk, the: despotic image of in the English mind, 25, 112; as enslavers, 25 Ulster, Ireland, 19, 95, 205 –6, 232 Uncas, 143 Underhill, John, 45, 72 Unfree labor. See English Atlantic: unfree colonial labor regime; impressment; press

371

gang; slaveries in the English Atlantic; slave trades in the English Atlantic United Colonies, 224; and the Commonwealth of England, 219; and Magisterial Reformation, 142 – 43; and relations with Native Americans, 142 – 44, 151–52, 159, 210 United Provinces: and Anglo-Dutch War, 225 –26; and impressment, 184, 225 –26 Vane, Henry, 6, 77, 83, 97, 118; as antinomian leader in Massachusetts, 71–72; and creation of New Model Army, 165 –66, 196; debate with Martin Noell over bond slave trade, 277–78; and dissolution of the Rump Parliament, 226; imprisoned, 256; influence of, in Long Parliament, 150; and Irish conquest, 217–18; and navy, 150, 224 –26; New England, and political thought of, 78 –80, 103; and the Nineteen Propositions, 102 –3; and the Protectorate, 256 –57; and regicide, 201–2; and Rhode Island, 128, 149, 152, 159, 285; and Solemn League and Covenant, 165; trial and execution of, 285; and “war party,” 165; and work with Coleman Street revolutionaries, 91. See also A Healing Question; The Retired Man’s Meditations Vanity of the Present Churches, 211 Vassal, Samuel, 150 Vassal, William, 49 Venables, Robert: and Irish conquest, 232; and Western Design, 233 –36 Venner, Thomas, 6; Boston militia service of, 241, 287; circular migration of, 241; Fifth Monarchist meetings, Swann Alley, Coleman Street Ward, 255, 268 –71, 275; Fifth Monarchist rebellion (1657) and, 275 –76; Fifth Monarchist rebellion (1661) and, 1–2, 276, 281–83, 294; imprisoned, 240– 41, 275; leads Fifth Monarchist meetings in St. Katherines, 272, 274; migration to Massachusetts, 58; and Samuel How, 241; trial and execution of, 1, 2, 3, 283 –85, 284 Villiers, George (duke of Buckingham), 31; assassination of, 33 –34; and expedition to Île de Ré, 32 Virginia, 21, 49, 50, 80, 243; allegiance during English Revolution, 127; and bond slavery, 55, 242, 261, 272; Commonwealth expedition to, 220–21; compared to Massachusetts, 55; Opecanchenough’s

372

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Virginia (continued) massacre and, 24, 207; Powhattan massacre and, 207; Powhattan war and, 124; religious conflict and, 124 –25, 219; royalists on, 219 –21; tobacco and, 22 –23, 48, 221; and Western Design, 230 Virginia Company, 52; and bond slave trade, 22 –24; Crown dissolves, 26 –27; and headright system, 48, 245 Waller, Hardress, 205 Walwyn, William, 6, 106, 190, 196, 250; criticisms of merchant revolutionaries, 211–13; exhorts Samuel How, 212; imprisoned, 211; on Native Americans, 155; practical Christianity of, 179; political thought of, 181–87; and rise of the Levellers, 181. See also Vanity of the Present Churches Walwyn’s Wiles, 212 Wampanoag Indians, 63 Ward, Nathaniel, 139 – 40 Wars of the Three Kingdoms, 5 Warwick, Phillip, 90 Warwick, Rhode Island. See Shawomet Watertown, Massachusetts, 57, 124, 135 Welch, Phillip, 261–62 Weld, Thomas, 150 Welles, John, 106 Wentworth, Thomas: created earl of Strafford, 87; execution of, 93, 103, 126; and impressment for the Bishops’ Wars, 88 Western Design, 7, 239, 291, 293; and buccaneers, 235; death toll of, 200, 252 –53, 270; and disease, 200, 235, 236 –37; as “enslaving design,” 253 –55; Hispaniola, invasion of, 200, 234 –36; and impressment, 198, 226, 232 –34, 236; invasion of Jamaica, 200, 236 –37; launched, 199, 233; as mass murder, 270; as mercenary war, 253 –54, 256, 269; and mutinies, 199 –200; news of defeat reaches England, 251–52; and piracy, 230; planning of, 229 –32; soldiers enslaved on Jamaica, 200. See also Fifth Monarchists Western Niantic Indians, 69 West Indies: bond slavery in, 245, 260; colonization of, 54 –55, 258 –60; demand for unfree labor in, 214; and England’s plantation empire, 223; English imperial ambitions in, 13, 16, 25, 47–51, 84, 87, 95, 199,

216, 229 –32; royalists in, 216, 220–21; slavery in, 235 –36, 265; sugar boom, 213, 223. See also Barbados; Jamaica; Providence Island; Western Design Westminster Abbey, 83, 98 Westminster Assembly, 123, 170 Westminster Palace, 83 –84, 97–102, 188; and New Palace Yard, 35, 98 Wexford, Ireland, 207–8 Whalley, Edward, 251, 286 Wheelwright, John, 78, 79, 166; and Fast Day Sermon, 68 –69, 71, 107; and General Court trial, 71, 75 Whistler, Henry, 199, 246 White, Edward, 123 Whitehall (palace), 83, 87, 97–102, 196, 202, 251, 277 Wickes, John, 147 Wight, Sarah, 173 Wildman, John, 189, 190, 196 Williams, Roger, 6, 53, 78, 79, 126, 173, 250; and the “accursed thing,” 290; banished from Massachusetts, 63; challenges Massachusetts charter, 60–61, 63; defends Native American land rights, 60–61; missions to England, 122, 144, 149 –59, 285, 288; opposes massacre and enslavement of New England Indians, 73 –75, 287, 290; political thought of, 290; purchases Rhode Island, 128; and the racialization of savagery and slavery, 74, 154 –60, 290; and reformation through migration, 59. See also The Bloody Tenent of Persecution; A Key into the Language of America; liberty of conscience; religious toleration Wilson, John, 68, 72, 74, 76; and execution of Mary Dyer, 289 Wilson, Rowland, 216 Windmill Tavern. See Coleman Street Ward, places; Levellers Windsor Castle, 194 –95 Winship, Michael, 126 Winslow, Edward, 70; and Samuel Gorton, 151, 153, 177; as Western Design commissioner, 232, 234, 237. See also The Danger of Tolerating Levellers in a Civil State Winthrop, Henry, 53 –54, 55 –56 Winthrop, John: and antinomians, 66, 68, 72, 123, 140, 149 –51, 289; assists Roger Williams, 63; cosmopolitan background of family, 53 –54; defends Massachusetts

index charter, 60; and the English poor, 14, 47, 54 –55; and outbreak of the English Revolution, 126; political thought of, 77–79, 103, 133, 138, 139 – 40, 144 –60; practical Christian reasons for colonizing New England, 54 –57; response to Aspinwall petition, 72. See also Model of Christian Charity Winthrop, John, Jr., 53, 70, 275; and Saugus iron works, 261 Winthrop, Samuel, 53 Winthrop, Stephen, 163, 189, 196, 205 Wilson, Rowland, 214 Wiseman, Richard, 98; political funeral of, in Coleman Street Ward, 100–101 Wiseman, William, 101 Withington, William, 265 women: as evangelists, 173; lead conventicles in Coleman Street Ward, 172 –73; and “monster births,” 140, 150; and outbreak of Antinomian Controversy, 64 –65; and petitioning in English Revolution, 102; political activities during the outbreak of

373

English Revolution, 91, 92, 93, 98, 102, 115; political activities of, in New England, 131–32; resist press gangs, 240; resist spirits and kidnappers, 240; targeted by leaders of Magisterial Reformers, 75 –76, 131, 140, 150. See also Attaway, Mrs.; Chidley, Katherine; Dyer, Mary; Hadley, Katherine; Hutchinson, Anne; Magisterial Reformation: and patriarchal social order; Stagg, Sister Wood, Roger, 122 –23 Worden, Blair, 202 Word for God, A, 268 Word in Season, A, 181 Wren, Matthew, 90 *Wroth, Thomas, 42, 43, 49; and bond slave trade, 22 –24; and Root and Branch bill, 101 Yale University, 289 York House, 97 Yorkshire, England, 288 Young, Alfred. F., 12