Your Puritan roots (history)

"My initial impression of the period was bounded by two conflicting preconceptions: The time-honored tradition of how the Pilgrims symbolized all that is good about America and the now equally familiar modern tale of how the evil Europeans annihilated the innocent Native Americans. I soon learned that the real-life Indians and English of the 17th century were both too smart, too generous, too greedy, and too brave—in short, too human—to behave so predictably." 

Nathaniel Philbrick, author,
Mayflower: Voyage, Community, War 

 Any immigrants, at any time, deserve our respect. From personal experience, I know that I am liable to be reduced to tears when, tired on my journey in a foreign country, I realize I cannot read the ingredients label on a can of soda and therefore don't know what I'm drinking. 

So I cannot imagine myself having the courage and faith to cross an ocean I know to be dangerous, in a creaking wooden boat to relocate to a wilderness that I know to be even more dangerous. And there's more: they even brought their kids!

Everyone knows the Puritans were motivated by religion, but that alone cannot explain putting self and family at such risk. To understand why anyone makes the choices they do, we need to know their context: What problems did they face at home and where they were bound? What opportunities did they see?

First, we need to appreciate the role of religion and of affiliation in the 17^th century. Then as now, religion provided spiritual comfort and guidance. Then as now, humans instinctively form tribes—groups in which cooperation comes easily because of shared language, social expectations, values, and world view.

But I think it's hard to appreciate how much more important those two things--religion and community--were to our Puritan ancestors. In the 17th century, your religion determined your community, and both were critical for making a living, marrying, and providing your kids with opportunities. 

The problem was that our ancestors lived when England's system of religious tribes was in a state of chaos. 

In the 1500s (the 16th Century), the institutional Catholic Church was deeply corrupt--it had been for as long as anyone could remember. In previous centuries, that hadn't really mattered--if you wanted to receive the grace of God, you respected your local clergy. 

But other developments started to crack the grip that the institutional church had on, well, everything. The printing press had made the Bible accessible to anyone who could read, so you did not need the church to tell you what it said. Developments in intellectual culture, known as The Enlightenment had begun to erode the felt need for the 'magical' powers of a Pope or Bishop. These developments had given rise to Protestantism. In Germany and Switzerland, theologians developed new interpretations of the Bible and new religious rituals. In England, King Henry the 8th separated government from the Catholic Church.

In the last decades of the 16th century, people were still working out what Protestantism should and should not be.  Differences of opinion created different types of Protestants within England. Briefly, these were:

1)      Anglicans were happy to break ties with Rome but wanted to keep many accoutrements and rituals of Catholicism. They wanted the monarch to have a role in the governance of the church, such as by appointing the bishops. Anglicans tended to be people who liked tradition, disliked change, and who were comfortable with the status quo in terms of their wealth and nobility.

2)      Puritans wanted to ‘purify’ the church—to reform the beliefs and practices of the Anglican church. They wanted to get rid of theological and organizational features that had led to corruption in the Catholic church. Educated tradespeople and professionals were typically among this group; John Calvin was their leading theological light.  Spoiler alert: These people went mostly to Massachusetts Bay Colony, mostly in the 1630s. Many of your ancestors were among them.

3)      Separatists were Puritans who had given up on reforming the Anglican Church, and believed that the monarch had no business running the church. They no longer considered themselves Anglican at all. These people went to Plymouth Colony in the 1620s. Some of your ancestors were among them.

When ecclesiastical and political power are intertwined, religious differences inevitably became legal oppression and political strife.  Disagreement over matters as trivial (to us) as what a clergyman should wear could cost people their careers or even their lives. (I'm not making that up:  They were rioting in the streets over clerical garb.)

Our ancestors' experiences in England differed depending upon who was on the throne at the time. Three monarchs are most important to this story.

1) Queen Elizabeth I (1558-1603) preferred not to get involved with religious issues. It distracted her from her real ambition: expanding England’s economic reach. Parliament had no patience for Catholics and separatists, but Puritanism flourished, becoming dominant in Parliament and in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. (You can see a handful of graduates among our ancestors.)

Execution of Separatist leaders Henry Barrow and John Greenwood, 1593

2)  King James I (1604-1625) was the monarch who first drove some of your ancestors from England. He actively sided with the Anglicans against both Puritans and separatists. When the Puritans petitioned James for far-reaching reforms, he granted only one of their requests, a new translation of the Bible, now known as the King James Version. But he denied all the rest. He mandated that parish churches use Anglican rituals and religious practices, ruining the moods and careers of many Puritans, particularly the clergy. By 1608, some Puritan leaders were in prison. 

It was in that year that a small group of Separatists, including some of our ancestors, left England for the Netherlands. They first settled in Amsterdam, which is where your 10G grandfather, James Hurst (#3085), met and married your 10G grandmother, Gartend Bennister (#3086; b. 1585 in Amsterdam). The group stayed only two years in Amsterdam before moving to Leiden, where they stayed for almost eleven years. One reason they eventually decided to leave the Netherlands for America was because their kids were getting too involved with the Dutch culture—for which this marriage seems to provide evidence. (Poor Gartend! She probably thought she was marrying an educated, middle-class Englishman and she ended up 3,500 miles across the ocean in the American wilderness. But he did well for himself as builder and proprietor of the Plymouth Colony's first tannery.) Note to self: Also look at Elizabeth Cote #3228, whose parents were married in the Netherlands; that family could also be among the Leiden Separatists.

3) The third monarch in our story, King Charles I (1625-1649), imposed such severe sanctions on non-Anglicans that he provoked the historic "Great Migration" of both Separatists and Puritans to the New World. Historians estimate that 13,000 Puritan men, women, and children left England for America between 1630 and 1642 when the King forbade further emigration. Most of your Puritan ancestors arrived in America during Charles' reign. His intolerance finally sparked a civil war in 1642 that cost him his head, but most of our guys were already in America by then.

Charles' effect on your family tree is apparent, for example, in the connected histories of Hingham (England) and Hingham (Massachusetts). 

Charles' Archbishop William Laud, appointed in 1633, imposed strict Anglican practices on all English churches, which included St. Andrews Church in the bucolic village of Hingham in Norfolk. 

The pastor there, Robert Peck, lowered a rail in the sanctuary; held prayer meetings in homes; sung Psalms on the Sabbath and did a few other things that Laud considered intolerable. 

After Peck was called to London three times to answer to the authorities, he and his parishioners saw the writing on the wall. In 1638, 133 of them sold their homes and land, boarded the Diligent with Peck, and left for America to create the town of Hingham, Massachusetts within the Plymouth Colony.  A lot of your DNA was on that boat. You're a descendant of the Bates, Beal, Gill, Hobart, James, Lincoln, Ripley, Rust, and Tower families, who were born in the English Hingham and died in the American Hingham.

The Old Ship Church in Hingham, Massachusetts.
Your 10G granduncle Peter Hobart served as pastor of this congregation from 1634 to 1678,
and your ancestors' hands helped to construct this church.
Still in use, this building is the oldest continuously used house of worship in the US.

If religion was the focus of most of the Puritans' problems, economics was their opportunity. Most (not all) of the Puritans who immigrated from 1620-1640 were economically comfortable in England--for the most part, they had to pay their way on the voyage and take with them about two years' of supplies. Poor people couldn't do that. But although they were comfortable, they and many others saw economic opportunity in what seemed to be an endless new continent with ample fertile land on which hard-working people could support themselves, under the protection of the British military and with access to England's international trade routes. There was no question that the colonists could sell what they could grow or manufacture. English investors who had no intention of leaving home themselves were willing to finance earnest settlers. The company that financed the Plymouth Pilgrims called themselves—I'm not making this up—the Merchant Adventurers.

But what about the Native Americans? What were their problems and opportunities? Why didn’t they expel the invaders? Were they as gullible and trusting as children? Stupid?

The American Natives, with their own highly developed culture of inter-tribal relations, were as savvy as the English about how to deal with competitors and adversaries, both diplomatically and forcibly. They were not innocent and trusting naïfs.

However, having lived for generations on a continent of lush abundance with plenty for everyone, their cultures had not developed the concepts and legal structures of permanent land ownership that experience with scarcity had developed among the English. In addition, the Natives lacked immunity to European pathogens, and they lacked steel. (Other technologies, too, but steel was critical. Guns and knives were becoming necessities and could be obtained only through trade.)

English, French, and Dutch had been visiting New England for more than a decade before 1620, so when the Mayflower landed on Cape Cod, the Natives knew who they were and what could be acquired by trading with them. (What could be lost had not yet become apparent.) Several, including Squanto (Tisquantum), even spoke English fluently, having spent 14 years in England and Spain.

The settlement at Plymouth was never contested by the Natives. Whether by luck or by the hand of God, the Mayflower pilgrims unknowingly planted their first foothold on prime land the Natives no longer wanted. Shortly before the colonists arrived, an epidemic had wiped out the Patuxet community that lived there, and other Natives were steering clear.  

An 1857 imagining of the meeting between Massasoit, leader of the Wampanoags and the Plymouth settlers.
The mutual-defense agreement they made in March 1621 lasted for more than 50 years.

 

Although everyone knew—and wanted—the benefits of peaceful coexistence and mutually profitable trade, competition and misunderstandings led to hostilities from time to time. National interests clashed among the European tribes (English, Dutch, and French), while Native tribes and bands were often in conflict with each other. In fact, the main reason why the Wampanoag tribe provided early, life-saving support to the young Plymouth Colony was that the tribe saw the advantages of an English alliance in their then-active conflict with the Narragansetts. A mutual defense pact was in place within a day of the Pilgrims' first meeting with Wampanoag chief Massasoit. The two most costly wars with the Natives during English settlement of Massachusetts and Connecticut—the Pequot War and King Phillip’s War, in which we lost ancestors—were sparked by tensions between Native tribes, although the presence of the English had exacerbated those tensions. 

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There's more about life in Colonial Massachusetts in the tidbits I saved directly into the list of our individual ancestors.

Source for much of the English religious history in this post is a YouTube lecture by Liam O'Brien, New England Public Media. I found it entertaining.