The Wordy Shipmates (13 page)

The Boston congregation reassigned John Wilson as their pastor and elected Cotton their teacher. (The studious Cotton would later justify escaping to America to avoid prison in London, “where there would be no opportunity for books or pens.”) Cotton’s preaching was a big hit. Within three months, Winthrop remarks in his journal, many “profane and notorious evil persons came and confessed their sins, and were comfortably received into the bosom of the church” in Boston.

John Cotton arrives in 1633 just in time to help Massachusetts Bay board up its theological windows. Hurricane Roger is a coming. Winthrop reports in his journal that he turns to Cotton for advice. It seems Roger Williams has arrived at some exciting new conclusions, which he has generously decided to share with his fellow colonists.

Neither Williams nor Cotton will ever get over their arguments of 1633-35. The two will spend the rest of their lives irking each other so much they would engage in the seventeenth-century New England version of a duel: pamphlet fight! Since the contemporary record of Massachusetts Bay’s quarrel with Williams, and vice versa, consists mostly of Winthrop’s journal, Williams and Cotton’s later publications are handy for getting the skinny on what the original fuss was about. Williams publishes “Letter of Mr. John Cotton,” unbeknownst to its sender; then Williams publishes his own rebuttal, “Mr. Cotton’s Letter Examined and Answered.” Cotton then publishes “John Cotton’s Answer to Roger Williams.” After which Williams publishes a pamphlet taking Cotton to task,
The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution.
Then Cotton slams Williams right back with
The Bloudy Tenent Washed and Made White in the Blood of the Lamb.
Then Williams counterattacks with
The Bloudy Tenent Yet More Bloudy.
Only death prevented Cotton from finishing his final sequel,
The Bloudy Tenent: Attack of the Clones.

On December 27, 1633, Winthrop writes in his journal that he has met with the court of assistants and some of “the most judicious ministers,” which would include Cotton, about a “treatise” Williams sent to the governor of Plymouth “wherein, among other things, he disputes their right to the lands they possessed here, and concluded that, claiming by the king’s grant, they could have no title, nor otherwise, except they compounded with the natives.” In other words, Williams says the royal charter that gave Plymouth the rights to Plymouth is illegal because what Plymouth really needed was a deed from the Indians. Williams is under the impression the land belonged to its original inhabitants.

Winthrop continues that the magistrates and the ministers are also “much offended” by Williams’s description of the late King James as a liar who committed the blasphemy of “calling Europe Christendom, or the Christian world.”

Roger Williams is God’s own goalie—no seemingly harmless pleasantry gets past him. To Williams, “Christendom,” that affable word describing Europe and its colonies, is an affront to Christ. For this, he blames Constantine the Great.

Is he referring to Constantine, the first Roman emperor to legalize Christianity in the year 313, thereby allowing Christians to worship in peace after centuries in the Coliseum as lion food? Yep, that’s the jerk.

In
The Bloudy Tenent,
Williams points out that Constantine “did more to hurt Christ Jesus than the raging fury of the most bloody Neroes.” At least under the Christian persecutor Nero, who was rumored to have had the Apostle Paul beheaded and Saint Peter crucified upside down, Christianity was a pure (if hazardous) way of life. But when Constantine himself converted to Christianity, that’s when the Church was corrupted and perverted by the state. Williams explains that under Constantine, “the gardens of Christ’s churches turned into the wilderness of national religion, and the world (under Constantine’s dominion) to the most unchristian Christendom.” Legalizing, legitimizing the Church turned Christianity into just another branch of government enforced by “the sword of civil power,” i.e., through state-sponsored violence.

On the one hand, there is no surer sign that Williams should probably ease up his Christian truth quest than when the magistrates of Massachusetts Bay find him to be too theologically intense. I just feel sorry for him that he lived in an age before air quotes; maybe he would have calmed down about use of the word “Christendom” if he could make sarcastic hand gestures every time he heard or said it.

On the other hand, Williams makes an interesting point. Remember that Christendom, at the moment he complains about King James once using that word on a charter, is at war with itself, that being the Thirty Years’ War. Catholics are slaughtering Protestants in France and Protestants are slaughtering Catholics in Germany. A year after Williams arrived in Boston, the town held a day of Thanksgiving to celebrate the fall of Munich at the hands of Gustavus Adolphus, Sweden’s Protestant king. Williams would later write, “The blood of so many hundred thousand souls of Protestants and Papists, spilt in the wars of present and former ages, for their respective consciences, is not required nor accepted by Jesus Christ the Prince of Peace.”

Winthrop issues a warning to John Endecott in Salem, where Williams was living, pointing out that Williams’s treasonous put-downs are not confined to the late king but include the current one. Winthrop alludes to Williams citing three particularly mean verses from the Book of Revelation that he “did personally apply to our present king, Charles.”

Williams backs down—for now. He writes “very submissively” to Winthrop and the council that he regrets the hubbub and permits his treatise “to be burnt.” A few weeks later, Winthrop is pleased to report that the Reverends Cotton and Wilson were mollified by Williams’s “retraction.”

In May of 1634, Winthrop writes in his journal, “The court chose a new governor, viz., Thomas Dudley, Esq., the former deputy.” Winthrop is elected deputy governer. In other words, he is now his rival’s number two. He is surely embarrassed but his diary contains no bellyaching. It was of course God’s will, so he deserved it. In fact, Winthrop has all the assistants over for dinner. Though, perhaps to cheer himself up about his accomplishments while governor, he does write a letter to a friend in England a few days later talking up the colony’s improved mortality stats. “There hath not died above two or three grown persons and about so many children all the last year,” he boasts.

In July of 1634, the assistants receive a letter from Matthew Craddock, the Massachusetts Bay Company’s man in England. The Commission for Regulating Plantations, headed by the king’s pet, Bishop Laud, is recalling the patent, i.e., the Charter. Craddock “wrote to us to send it home,” records Winthrop. Ship back the Charter and they might as well pack up the whole colony in the same trunk. The assistants agree to reply to Craddock’s letter, but without the Charter, and without “any answer or excuse.” Poor Craddock—ordered by Laud to procure a document and all he gets in return is a letter about how the weather sure is hot in Boston? Winthrop records that Craddock fires back, enclosing in his reply, hint-hint, a copy of the government order “whereby we were required to send over our patent.” Unnerved, the assistants nevertheless write Craddock back that they couldn’t possibly legally return the Charter to England “but by a general court,” which would not be held until the following September.

In Winthrop’s next entry, the assistants meet on Castle Island in Boston Harbor where they conspire to build a fort. Remember the apocalyptic paranoia that inspired the passengers on the Winthrop fleet to quit England in the first place? Well, that was mostly superstitious conjecture based on pessimistic readings of biblical prophets and worries that the Thirty Years War might spread to England. This business of the king’s committee recalling the charter is an actual concrete threat to their hard-won way of life. Winthrop was born the year his country’s fleet defeated the mighty Spanish Armada; he knows English monarchs are not shy about dispatching their battleships when provoked.

In August, Winthrop gets word that the colony’s enemies in England, led by men banished from Massachusetts, have made “railing speeches and threats against this plantation and Mr. Winthrop in particular.” They succeeded in getting Laud’s committee to appoint a governor to come to Massachusetts with a military escort and take over. By January, Winthrop says, the assistants and ministers hold a meeting in Boston to discuss “what we ought to do, if a general governor should be sent out of England.”

In his journal, Winthrop records their answer to that cat aclysmic question of how the men of Massachusetts should respond to the arrival of a royal interloper sent to put an end to their city on a hill: “We ought not to accept him.”

Remember this is almost a century and a half before the Boston Tea Party, before Lexington and Concord, before the Battle of Bunker Hill in Charlestown burns down that tavern built on the site of Winthrop’s first American house. John Winthrop is no Son of Liberty. He’s a Puritan father of communal control. But behind the politeness of that line, “We ought not to accept him,” Winthrop reveals himself. He is a pussy-footing pragmatist who will clap his own hand over Roger Williams’s mouth and confiscate John Endecott’s sword if it keeps from riling up King Charles. But we know from Winthrop’s journal that he left England with a recipe for gunpowder. That same journal is clear about this: if the king’s men come for Massachusetts, Massachusetts will be ready.

Where do these men get such cheek? They are the king’s subjects, not citizens. What are the sources of their defiance? There are, I think, primarily two: the Bible and the Magna Carta.

The Bible is full of anecdotes that prime the pump of treason. We have already read of King James’s irritation with the way the Geneva Bible’s marginal notes spell out how it is biblically sanctioned to defy the Egyptian pharaoh (and therefore all monarchs) when he commands that Hebrew babies be murdered. But those prickly Protestant marginal notes are simply amplifying what’s already in the text. I grew up on the King James Version of the Bible, the translation that was, by definition, supposed to be more tolerable to kings, and I would like to point out that by the time I was eight I had already put on a puppet show about how people of faith are required to stand up to wrongheaded kings.

Every summer when I was a kid I attended vacation Bible school. It was like arts-and-crafts camp, only churchier—firing and glazing ceramic praying-hands bookends, that sort of thing. We studied the Book of Daniel’s third chapter, in which Nebuchadnezzar, the king of Babylon, commissioned a gold idol that his subjects were required to bow down to. Anyone failing to kneel before the image “shall be cast into the midst of a burning fiery furnace.” Kneeling before a false idol being an obvious violation of the Second Commandment, three Jews on Nebuchadnezzar’s payroll refuse to worship another god. The three lawbreakers, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, are hauled before the king, who tells them that when he said that thing about the fiery furnace he really meant it. They reply that perhaps God will save them from the flames, “But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up.”

Those words are insolent and bold, even when spoken by a felt puppet with glued-on googly eyes. The three hope God will save them, but if not they will gladly burn. Nebuchadnezzar is happy to help them find out. He has Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego thrown into the furnace. To mimic the flames, my fellow Bible students and I rattled flashlights at the puppets, who remained perfectly still and perfectly unharmed, not a yarn hair on their heads singed. “ They have no hurt,” marveled the king, who decreed that anyone from anywhere who spoke against “the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, shall be cut in pieces, and their houses shall be made a dunghill: because there is no other God that can deliver after this sort.” A happy ending—the faithful defy the king and the king admits he was wrong.

The lessons of that story—be true to yourself, be not afraid to defy authority, be willing to die for what you believe in—had a profound influence on my own moral backbone, and I am not alone. In his “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King, Jr., writes of the lawbreaking that landed him in the clink: “Of course, there is nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience. It was evidenced sublimely in the refusal of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar, on the ground that a higher moral law was at stake.”

In 1940, when more than 300,000 British and French troops were trapped on the beach in the Belgian coastal town of Dunkirk, awaiting certain death at the hands of the approaching German army, the British commander there sent a three-word message to England of his men’s resolve to stick it out and fight: “But if not.” Stirred by the subtle reference to Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, the British people jumped into their yachts and fishing boats by the thousands and raced across the English Channel to ferry the soldiers to safety.

“God’s people have been immovable, constant, and resolved to the death in refusing to submit to false worships, and in preaching and professing the true worship, contrary to the express command of public authority,” wrote Roger Williams in
The Bloudy Tenent.
He continued, “So the three famous worthies against the command of Nebuchadnezzar.”

Of course a mischief-maker like Williams would make Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego his personal mascots. But the more mild-mannered Winthrop read the same Bible, including the Geneva Version, where the notes on the Book of Daniel are typically feisty toward royal authority. Perhaps Winthrop, his peripheral vision ever scanning the horizon for the warships of King Charles, perused Daniel 3:19, when Nebuchadnezzar instructs the furnace operators to crank up the heat “seven times” hotter for his three victims. The Geneva marginal note to that verse reads:

This declares that the more that tyrants rage, and the more crafty they show themselves in inventing strange and cruel punishments, the more is God glorified by his servants, to whom he gives patience and constancy to abide the cruelty of their punishment.