Staffing and the Problem of Religious Expertise

Although Plymouth was occasionally accused of religious radicalism in its early years, the settlers were united in the view that the man who led their worship had to be educated. No one believed that an uneducated individual – much less a woman – could guide the church, and in that regard the church forswore the extremes associated with those who elevated lay preachers to the highest office. The Leiden church’s leader, John Robinson, instructed his followers of the necessity of a university education in a minister, and those who had been members of his congregation held to that requirement. Adequate staffing therefore necessitated appointing a man trained at Oxford or Cambridge, well-versed in languages and Christian theology. A lay settler, regardless of his gifts, could not fill the post. Indeed, Robinson instructed William Brewster, who had spent time at Cambridge but never graduated, that it was “not lawfull for you” to administer sacraments when only a ruling elder.Footnote ¹³

The church’s problem finding a suitable pastor would have been resolved by the arrival of their Leiden minister, John Robinson. The leader of the English separatist church in Leiden never undertook the transatlantic journey. Cambridge educated, Robinson had developed a reputation as a thoughtful and serious proponent of Reformed Protestantism. Although frequently lumped in for his separatism with other radicals, his published theological works reveal him to fit comfortably on many points into the puritan wing of the Church of England. As Keith L. Sprunger noted, while at Leiden, Robinson wrote numerous theological treatises that gained him “an international Puritan reputation.”Footnote ¹⁴ His intractable opposition to the practice of vesting great power in the office of bishop alone compelled him to separate.Footnote ¹⁵ Members of his church knew they were fortunate to look to such a man for leadership. Those who sailed in 1620 regretted leaving him behind, even if (as they hoped) the separation would be only temporary, as the letters they subsequently exchanged with him make clear.Footnote ¹⁶ In the meantime, they relied on ruling elder Brewster to see to their spiritual needs. As Bradford would later eulogize Brewster: “when the church had no minister, he taught twice every Saboth, and y^t both powerfully, and profitably, to y^e great contentment of y^e hearers, and their comfortable edification, yea many were brought to god by his ministrie He did more in this behalfe in a year then many that have their hundreds a year doe in all their lives.”Footnote ¹⁷ Despite the admiration expressed here, the church never elevated Brewster to the status of pastor. In the five years after their landing, Brewster, Bradford, and others held out hope that Robinson would eventually join them and that the Leiden church would be reconstituted in its entirety in Plymouth under their beloved pastor. It was only Robinson’s death in 1625 that finally convinced them to search for another man to lead the community.Footnote ¹⁸ Separating from Robinson had clearly proved difficult for Leiden migrants among the Plymouth settlers.

Much ink has been spilt – especially by the settlers’ modern admirers – on Robinson’s failure to journey to Plymouth. Many authors assume he felt a strong desire to do so, even as he learned of the high death rate and other difficulties the migrants faced, but his commitment to the idea over time is difficult to gauge. In the evangelical circles where the story is frequently retold, his eagerness to be reunited with this sector of his flock is taken as axiomatic. He did assert his desire to do so in a letter to his brother in law John Carver in 1620, although subsequent letters addressed the matter only to explain why he was not doing so.Footnote ¹⁹ Such accounts blame the investors who backed the migrants but were unwilling to pay for the transportation of Robinson and others who had remained behind. According to a letter that Robinson wrote in 1623, the investors acknowledged no obligation to pay for additional church members’ travel.Footnote ²⁰ If they wanted to go, they would need to finance their own passage.

The Christian commentators on this question cast the investors as persecutors bent on thwarting the true church, but in fact they had good economic reasons to hesitate. As with all early colonial investors, the Adventurers (as they were called for having adventured their money) found that they had made a bad bargain: they were among the first to learn that new settlements absorbed vast sums but never yielded quick returns. Sending those Leiden church members who had chosen not to go with the first sailing appeared a losing proposition, especially if age or infirmity had caused their initial hesitation. Their later Christian critics correctly surmised that reuniting the church was not their highest priority – indeed the Adventurers disclaimed having made any commitment to do so – but that had less to do with their hostility to religion and more to do with their interest in a return on their investment.Footnote ²¹ Later, the settlers themselves shouldered further expense in bringing other individuals from Leiden, but they were in no position to do so in the years before Robinson’s death.Footnote ²²

The few English Protestant churches in the wider Atlantic in the 1620s all faced difficulties recruiting clergyman, but Plymouth had a special set of problems.Footnote ²³ While the small struggling community had little to offer a prospective minister, the separatist leanings of the most dedicated meant that they could not be satisfied with the usual candidates likely to wash up on Plymouth’s shores.Footnote ²⁴ Given its opposition to episcopal ordination, the church refused to accept the idea that a minister could be assigned to it by any outside authority, but expected instead to issue its own call to the candidate of its choosing. One Church of England clergyman resided in the region briefly without a pulpit, but no evidence exists that he sought a relationship with the Plymouth church.Footnote ²⁵ The first man in the settlement with the proper educational credentials to warrant consideration agreed to abide by the policy of awaiting a call from the church, perhaps confident that one was imminent. As Robert Cushman (1577–1625) wrote to his friends in Plymouth via the same ship that brought John Lyford (ca. 1580–1634), “he knows he is no officer amongst you, though perhaps custome, and universalitie may make him forget him selfe.”Footnote ²⁶ Cushman was prescient, for later Lyford felt affronted when the church failed to appoint him. At the time, church leaders continued doggedly to insist that Robinson be sent, and they flatly refused to appoint another. Even after Robinson’s death, the church remained committed to deliberating carefully about any prospective minister. Of one of them, “they perceived upon some trial, that he was crased in his braine.” Sending him back to England, they resented having to foot the bill for his transport.Footnote ²⁷ Finally in 1629 their caution was rewarded with a satisfactory minister, who first “exercised his gifts amongst them, and afterwards was chosen Into y^e ministrie and remained for sundrie years.”Footnote ²⁸ After a decade of striving, Plymouth finally had its first pastor. Only in 1636 did the church install someone with some staying power, when John Rayner (or Reyner) took up the post. A graduate of Magdalene College, Cambridge, he arrived in New England in 1635, and remained in Plymouth until some unnamed difference caused him to resign in 1654.Footnote ²⁹ However hostile they were to bishops, this church foreswore the radicalism of some, never elevating an uneducated man as their leader.

Finding a pastor for the Plymouth church suddenly became easier because of a shifting context; many reform-minded, educated men with pastoral experience came to New England with the so-called Great Migration that began in 1630. Not only the first man appointed, Ralph Smith, but all those that came after, arrived in Plymouth as a result of the deluge of clerical talent that flooded into neighboring Massachusetts and overflowed into their tiny settlement. These men had the university education that Robinson thought requisite. Although most of them had undergone episcopal ordination as clergymen in the Church of England, they all accepted that it was the Plymouth church’s call to them that made them its minister. With the arrival of the first Massachusetts Bay Company ships in 1629, the Plymouth church soon had candidates to fill its needs.

I have elsewhere argued that some variants of Protestantism were better suited to the Atlantic context because of their greater portability. That advantage could be thwarted, however, in the absence of the needed components. A portable faith that only requires a minister and believers to make a church cannot be transplanted without both. Had the ecclesiastical context of the English Atlantic world not undergone the unexpected transformation that resulted when crisis in England sent a flood of qualified men into the Americas, Plymouth might have continued its frustrated attempts to locate an adequate leader. Archbishop Laud, pursuing policies that drove many vigorous believers away, inadvertently benefited the Plymouth church. The leadership gap was filled only because of the effects of Laud’s efforts to reshape Protestantism in England.

Membership

Although the challenges of finding a pastor were only resolved with aid inadvertently given by the much maligned archbishop, transplanting a church also posed issues of inclusion and exclusion. Those who left Leiden to journey to America agreed in advance that they constituted a church distinct from that in Leiden but that any future Leiden migrants who were in that church would be included in the Plymouth church without question. Difficulties in making the voyage meant that some of the intended migrants from Leiden stayed behind, so that the new church gathered in anticipation of leaving Europe did not travel intact to Plymouth.Footnote ³⁰ Those who did ultimately sail included not only fewer Leiden passengers than anticipated but also numerous additional persons who had not been gathered into the new migrant church prior to their departure. While a gathered church arrived intact, it did not encompass all the passengers who might potentially want to be a part of it.

Arriving in New England as a mixed group meant that the Leiden remnant on the Mayflower faced in stark form one of the major issues animating the Reformation movement throughout Europe – and perhaps most pressingly in the Atlantic world: how should the church relate to the world? In Scrooby, Amsterdam (where the migrants tarried briefly), and Leiden, the answer had been clear: following Robinson’s teaching, the church separated from the Church of England, gathered an independent congregation of self-selected individuals, and carved its own path. In all three settings, those who did not join Robinson’s congregation enjoyed other options: first, the local Church of England parish in England; then a number of English-language Protestant churches in Amsterdam; and finally an English Reformed Church affiliated with the Dutch Reformed establishment in Leiden. Coming to a part of the North American coast heretofore unsettled by European Christians, the people in Plymouth had no options other than what they organized for themselves. The nearest alternative – the churches in Virginia – were over 600 miles away. The migrants themselves had to create their own institutions. In considering the status of the strangers who journeyed with them to America, the former members of the Leiden church directly confronted the problem of how to accommodate those that they had previously left out of their calculations.

The question of membership – how one qualified and what to do with a rising number of residents who did not – would eventually dog churches elsewhere in New England. In the first colonies (Virginia and Somers’ Island) organized under the Church of England, everyone was considered a member, in accordance with the parish model. The Leiden congregation had never been a parish church – as a gathered church, its members left their parish home to form an alternative. In England and in the Netherlands, the church accepted like-minded people who sought them out but had no responsibility for the wider community’s spiritual welfare. In Plymouth, no dominant ecclesiastical order existed, presenting a new situation to the migrating Leiden remnant. They had in effect become the parish church, in the sense that they were responsible for the spiritual care of all residents. If they chose to neglect that care, by restricting membership to only a select group, the unchurched residents would go without.

How Plymouth church addressed the question of membership initially cannot be fully discerned. Did they expand the limited parameters that included only some of those who had gathered a new church in Leiden to accept all residents as members? The early records, sparse and unsystematic, hint that additional individuals won formal acceptance as members.Footnote ³¹ Some scholars have concluded that the bar for admission to the Plymouth church was low, so that all who sought admission attained it.Footnote ³² Surviving evidence does not clarify whether the Plymouth church instituted any particular admission requirement such as testifying to a saving grace experience in order to gain admission. The practice, which would be adopted in neighboring colonies later, may not have been part of Plymouth practice in the first years. In 1634, while in England, church member Edward Winslow described their expectations that new members be able “to render a Reason of that ffaith & hope they have in Christ … togeather w^th a good testimony of an honest life,” which suggested some ritual surrounding admission.Footnote ³³ Bradford described the occasion on which one new member joined, giving “a large confession of his faith; and an acknowledgemente of his former disorderly walking.” Confession of previous sins – many different sorts of which could be encompassed under the phrase “disorderly walking” – was standard both in those churches that did require such a narrative (as well as more generally in the spiritual autobiographies that lay people occasionally penned). Bradford’s account gives the impression that this individual offered a particularly elaborate profession, which he reported as evidence of his hypocrisy. Given that, Bradford’s recounting does not make clear if the church demanded this ritual moment of confession as the price of admission or if the prospective member volunteered it of his own accord.Footnote ³⁴ Whether the church admitted all or left some out, they clearly welcomed all residents to their religious gatherings. Just as in Massachusetts Bay subsequently, members and non-members alike attended worship services. Those who failed to hear the word preached the Plymouth authorities sought out, although the court records give no sign that they meted out punishments in the early days in order to coerce attendance.Footnote ³⁵

Gaining admission (or being denied it) would have been felt most compellingly at the various moments in the community’s life when members separated themselves out to practice ordinances. When they brought their children to be baptized or they themselves approached the table for the Lord’s Supper, they drew lines of inclusion and exclusion. Yet the members of the Plymouth church had no opportunity to set themselves apart in this way initially. Without a pastor – with only their ruling elder for spiritual leadership – and with a firm commitment to having the ordinances performed only by a clergyman, the church went without both baptism and communion throughout the 1620s. As a consequence, the church did not enact the ritual separation of members from non-members in the first years. The so-called Particulars (as those who paid their own way to the settlement and thus had no part in the arrangement that bound the Mayflower arrivals and others to the financial arrangements with the Adventurers) complained that they would have “none to live heare but themselves.” This accusation, which Bradford hotly denied, suggested that Plymouth was rife with exclusionary impulses and indeed wanted to limit not only membership in the church, but also residences in the plantation to those they selected.Footnote ³⁶

What this situation meant in effect was that the only form of worship in existence was fully available to anyone who attended their services. Everyone gathered to hear Brewster preach and teach. It would seem then that the Plymouth church, in its first decade, looked rather like those that would be founded later in Massachusetts Bay and other “orthodox” New England churches, with members and non-members together attending services. The latter were welcomed even though they were likely to have formerly been (and even to consider themselves still) Church of England communicants (and therefore those from whom the Scooby/Leiden church had separated).Footnote ³⁷ If nothing else, the church included them in worship gatherings, appreciating that they “might benefit from mutual admonishment.”Footnote ³⁸ In any case, Robinson had taught that limited communion with such individuals might be acceptable, and hence the church’s position did not constitute a rejection of his precepts.

At the moment when the residents of Plymouth first had to confront the question of what to do when the ordinances were available and only some could come forward to partake, the ground under their church had begun to shift for other reasons. The new migration stream that brought in prospective pastors also vastly increased the Plymouth population, leading to the founding of new towns and new churches within its jurisdiction. Just at the moment when Robinson’s followers finally had access to the full panoply of church rituals, this influx added numerous Reform-minded Protestants with their own evolving views about the proper church order. Plymouth church came into its own even as a regional religious culture was taking shape. Prior to that, Plymouth had not been in a position to establish a strictly separatist church – or even to sort out precisely what that might look like in the very different American context. Given the paucity of information, we cannot conclusively know that Plymouth had looser admission standards, but it appears likely that John Demos was correct in asserting as much in his study of early Plymouth Plantation.Footnote ³⁹ A mixed company from the first, Plymouth church immediately compromised, under circumstances very different from those that Massachusetts churches initially faced. With a possibly undeserved reputation as the strictest local variant of Protestantism, Plymouth grew after 1630 by absorbing overflow population from its neighbor to the north. Occasionally Plymouth offered sanctuary to unconventional Christians – including Baptists and Quakers – looking for a more amenable home.Footnote ⁴⁰

If their separatist legacy might have made the former Leiden church members less inclined to compromise over questions of membership qualifications, their experience after migrating taught them different lessons. Plymouth arrived at New England’s second generation dilemma at the outset: it immediately confronted the question of the status of unbelievers, the non-saints, those who would not be included in a gathered church of self-selected saints. Plymouth began with many non-members in tow, as opposed to the Massachusetts Bay Colony migrants, who generally arrived expecting to join a gathered church different than the parish churches they left behind. Over time, New England as a whole hosted more non-members, as subsequent generations failed to join (much to the religious leaders’ chagrin), whereas from the outset Plymouth confronted their presence and the dilemmas they posed to a gathered church that accepted no responsibility for the wider world.

Given this situation, the scholarship treating Plymouth church as dedicated to separatism and laboring to uphold that tradition in the face of countervailing forces has little basis in the facts of New England’s first English settlement. Taking Bradford’s narrative arc of separatists fleeing England and later abandoning Leiden for Plymouth at face value, we have overlooked the facts that the first church founded in Plymouth’s jurisdiction included many non-separatists and that most churches subsequently gathered in the colony had no relationship to the Leiden church or the separatist tradition. The one clear exception, Duxbury Church, looked to Brewster as its leader once he was displaced from his quasi-pastoral role in Plymouth by the advent of clergy. When in 1630 William Bradford composed his detailed history of the background to Plymouth Plantation, charting the Scrooby/Amsterdam/Leiden trajectory, he did so to promote a particular view of the church’s and the community’s origins. He wrote when this background seemed in danger of being forgotten. He established the common view that Plymouth represented a transplanted church, pure and simple. As the early editor of his work asserted, Bradford demonstrated “a lesson the importance of which can hardly be over-rated. The one central fact of New England history was that it was an emigration not of individuals but of churches.”Footnote ⁴¹ The church-based narrative of Plymouth’s origins has become the standard narrative not only for Plymouth but for all of New England.

Guided by Bradford and aware that Plymouth’s enemies attacked it on the basis of its separatist connections, scholars have not looked closely at the admittedly limited information about local practice, but have simply assumed that Plymouth established its church along particular lines. Little direct evidence supports the emphasis on Plymouth’s commitment to separatism, yet scholars do not linger over that question but rather proceed to analyze the extent to which it may have influenced the non-separatism of every place else. It surely matters that the first moment when Plymouth church could act on questions of inclusion and exclusion around baptism or the Lord’s Supper occurred only after the arrival of the Massachusetts settlers, when Plymouth gained its first pastor, a huge influx of residents, and a series of new churches. Scholars have pointed out that migrating to a region of America without a bishop or a Church of England structure rendered moot questions of separating and non-separating – even implying that everyone became a de facto separatist in New England.Footnote ⁴² Yet the opposite may have been the case: that separatism become inconsequential in an environment in which a minority separatist group first provided parish-like religious services to all and sundry and then became overwhelmed by the arrival of others, who were bent on erecting pure churches that excluded the unworthy.

Praxis

Arguably, religious practice for English Protestants in the 1620s Atlantic world was deficient. From St. Christopher through Virginia and the Somers Islands to Plymouth, a shortage of ministers, a dearth of church buildings, and other lacks meant that services never replicated precisely what worshippers had known before migrating. In Plymouth, as noted, the church appointed a minister only in 1629, nine years after the first arrivals. Well before that date, the settlers built a combined fort and meeting house, described as “a large square house with a flat roof, built of thick sawn planks stayed with oak beams, upon the top of which they have six cannon … The lower part they use for their church, where they preach on Sundays and the usual holidays.”Footnote ⁴³ A space for worship represented one familiar English ecclesiastical practice – although including it in a fortified building departed from custom – and the Plymouth people created such a space relatively quickly. To solemnize the occasion of Sunday worship, a contingent of settlers marched, armed, from the door of the home of the militia captain (Miles Standish) – where they gathered “by beat of drum” – to the building; they processed “in order, three abreast, and are led by a sergeant without beat of drum. Behind comes the Governor, in a long robe; beside him on the right hand, comes the preacher with his cloak on, and on the left hand, the captain with his side-arms and cloak on, and with a small cane in his hand.” While this ritual may have been staged to demonstrate martial readiness for the benefit of the visitor who described it, the community’s ability to put on this show suggested they had practiced it prior to his arrival. Gathering for Sabbath worship represented an occasion for the community, and they used it in part to display their military prowess and possibly also to remind the residents to be prepared.

However much pomp and architecture the settlers could marshal to support their community worship, what happened inside the fortified meetinghouse revealed deficiencies. As we have seen, the services, in the absence of a clergyman, never included the baptisms or the Lord’s Supper that punctuated the community life of every Protestant in Europe. On a day-to-day level, the Leiden people would have found the services otherwise familiar, as they expected the gathering to revolve around preaching and teaching. Lacking a minister to administer sacraments, they at least received the edification and guidance that had been the mainstay of their worship life in Europe.

Others present would have marked further omissions. Those coming directly from an English parish would have missed the liturgy of the prayer book. English Protestants elsewhere in the Americas without clergy often appointed someone to read the service, receiving comfort from the familiar language contained in the Book of Common Prayer. Although Judith Maltby has gathered evidence of devotion to the prayer book in England – and I have found some elsewhere in the English Atlantic – surviving Plymouth records reveal no one articulating an attachment to its language and routines.Footnote ⁴⁴ Those who criticized Plymouth praxis in the first decade did not list failure to follow the prayer book as an issue – a book that may not have been present there anyway; the lack of any reference to debates over the established church liturgy suggested no one advocated for it or else no one complaining perceived it as an issue that would garner much attention. Thomas Morton, who was eventually run out of a nearby trade outpost, cited differences over the liturgy as one area of contention, but he did so only much later, at a time when he hoped to enlist Archbishop Laud against both Plymouth and Massachusetts.Footnote ⁴⁵ No contemporary evidence raised the issue.

Beside the liturgy, Church of England members would have missed other sacraments, especially church weddings. The Church of England solemnized marriages, but many reformed Protestants elsewhere relied on civil magistrates instead. Robinson’s former congregants firmly opposed solemnizing marriages in church. Having found no biblical precedent for the practice, they adopted civil ceremonies from the Dutch and continued that practice in New England. Later, during the interregnum when parliament ruled the nation without king or House of Lords, marriage in England temporarily became a civil institution. Although that moment lay in the future, Church of England officials were already on the alert to object to this derivation from their approach, and Edward Winslow may have been thrown in Fleet Prison at the behest of Laud in part for performing such marriages.Footnote ⁴⁶ In Plymouth at that time, the only options – in the absence of a minister – were to forego marriage or to allow a magistrate to solemnize them. Whether or not they missed church marriages, everyone in Plymouth would have found the religious practice truncated. That lack was felt by Leiden separatists as well as by those who came directly from an English parish church.

Even those who were satisfied with the omission of the prayer book and found Brewster fully competent to instruct and motivate them in his role as ruling elder also noted privations. Robert Cushman worried that their presence “in a Heathen Country,” would cause their countrymen to assume that “the grace of Christ” had been “quenched in us,” and he assured the readers of his lay sermon that it had not.Footnote ⁴⁷ Still, they lacked a teacher, leaving parents to catechize their children as best they could. More generally, they missed the vigorous spiritual life they had enjoyed in Leiden – a university town, where they were guided by a pastor who was also a renowned theologian, and where a few of their more elite members had launched a printing press that briefly produced English-language works.Footnote ⁴⁸ The most tangible remnant of that history in Plymouth could be found in Brewster’s enormous library (at his death its 400 books and 382 distinct titles rivaled John Harvard’s bequest that helped launch the college that bears his name).Footnote ⁴⁹ The people of Plymouth enjoyed the benefit of Brewster’s library, which he continued to build after migrating and out of which he loaned books to his neighbors.Footnote ⁵⁰ Otherwise, the Leiden people entered a backwater, where they found it difficult to recreate the religious lives they had known.

When the first contingent of Massachusetts settlers arrived in 1620, a church member from Plymouth journeyed there to aid in caring for those who had fallen ill; while there, Samuel Fuller and John Endecott agreed that they shared similar views of “y^e outward formes of Gods worshipe.”Footnote ⁵¹ Whatever his views of proper practice, Fuller’s own recent experience had been of understaffed pulpits, a mixed population, and an incomplete recreation of the expected range of religious practices. Despite our image of this community, Plymouth’s first years were entirely typical of other truncated efforts to transplant faith into the Atlantic settlements.

The Lyford Fiasco

The low point in the newly formed but not yet fully functional Plymouth church surely came in 1624. Plymouth was split over defenders of the nascent church and newly arrived individuals who wanted to undermine the power of the few Leiden men who headed both church and government. The clash prompted a transatlantic debate over the nature of the new settlement and of its church order, a clash which inadvertently captured aspects of Plymouth practice in this first decade. In a reversal of usual scholarly practice, a vignette not at the opening but offered by way of (an extended) conclusion allows a reconsideration of the issues of minister, membership, and praxis.

In 1624, controversy swirled around Plymouth’s little church, revealing otherwise unarticulated details about practices as well as the tensions arising from the aim to create a gathered church on the American strand. The investors prompted the crisis when they dispatched a prospective minister early in 1624 (instead of financing Robinson’s journey, as his former congregants hoped). How the unemployed Oxford graduate John Lyford came to the attention of the Adventurers is not known. He traveled with a sizeable household that included his wife, children, and servants. They arrived in New England in the Charity, which sailed in late April 1622 and reached Plymouth around the end of June. The terms on which Lyford went were later contested: at the time Robert Cushman assured friends there that Lyford knew he had been promised no post, but other Adventurers asserted that he was to be paid a stipend as a teacher.Footnote ⁵² Upon his arrival, Lyford asked to be made a member of the church. As Bradford later put it: “he made a large confession of his faith; and an acknowledgemente of his former disorderly walking, and his being Intangled with many corruptions, which had been a burthen to his conscience; and blessed God for this opportunitie, of freedom & libertie, to injoye y^e ordinances of God in puritie among his people.”Footnote ⁵³ Lyford accepted that he would only serve as the church’s pastor if called to do so by the other members. Disgruntled at receiving no call, he soon joined other residents, among them John Oldham (best known because his death in the next decade would contribute to the causes of the Pequot War). Oldham, Lyford, and others conspired to start their own church, with Lyford as its head – which they characterized as constituting, within the Plymouth context, “a reformation, in church and commone wealth.”Footnote ⁵⁴ The two men also wrote damning accounts of the infant settlement, maligning both religious and secular affairs.Footnote ⁵⁵

These transatlantic missives reverberated both in Plymouth and in England. With the cooperation of ship’s captain William Pierce, the settlement’s leaders retrieved the letters from his outbound ship. Making copies before sending them, they confronted the letters’ authors with the evidence of their duplicity. Like Anne Hutchinson in Massachusetts in the next decade, Lyford faced punishment from both the church – which excommunicated him – and the government – which banished him as well as Oldham. Oldham soon violated his exile; upon his return, “they comitted him, till he was tamer, and then apointed a gard of musketers w^ch he was to pass threw, and ever one was ordered to give him a thump on y^e brich, with y^e but end of his musket, and then was conveied to y^e water side, wher a boat was ready to carry him away.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Both men went to Virginia, Oldham later returning to meet his end in New England in 1636. In the meantime, their letters alerted the Adventurers about tensions in Plymouth.

The concerns of the Adventurers – besides the fact that Plymouth was proving a money pit – focused largely on the state of religious affairs. Lyford and Oldham accused the church of neglecting sacraments – an obvious accusation since they had no minister and therefore no sacraments; “familie duties on y^e Lords day” – by which they meant gathering for family prayer and Bible reading; and the need to catechize children. They also alleged that the church was guilty of “diversitie aboute religion.” This phrasing, given the later uses of the Plymouth legacy as a harbinger of religious freedom, contained a peculiar irony. The accusation alleged that Plymouth departed from standard English practice, in that they embraced an alternate viewpoint to that promoted by the Church of England; in modern parlance, they were guilt of adopting a differing position. From their perspective, diversity (or difference) was deleterious, as only one way was appropriate. The criticism may have been somewhat disingenuous, as Lyford himself may not have been entirely supportive of all aspects of Church of England practice. His history of services in the Irish Protestant Church could indicate that he was opened to the currents of reform within the mainstream English church, as was often the case with clergy who opted for an Irish Protestant pulpit. Bradford and Brewster’s response to this last point was classic obfuscation: they avoided the substance, merely noting that no one residing there had ever objected to any practice. “We know no such matter, for here was never any controversie or opposition, either publike, or private (to our knowledge) since we came.”Footnote ⁵⁷ In other words, no one had previously noted any divergences in their ways from those of the established church. An absence of such criticism did not connote lack of divergence from accepted practice, of course, but instead sidestepped the question entirely.

As for the other matters, some they admitted while laying the blame elsewhere. Such was the case with the lack of a minister (the fault, they said, of the Adventurers who failed to send Robinson).Footnote ⁵⁸ His absence also explained the unavailability of baptism or the Lord’s Supper, the sacraments they would have offered had they enjoyed the guidance of a clergyman. Some complaints they dismissed, such as religious weddings (which lacked biblical warrant). Still others they hotly denied: families saw to catechizing and teaching children, as Plymouth had no one to employ as a school teacher. Similarly, they never neglected the Sabbath, averring that “every lords day some are appointed, to visite suspected places, and if any be found Idling, and neglecte y^e hearing y^e word (through Idlnes or profanes), they are punished for y^e same.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Those defending the settlement pressed the point that they upheld basic principles that infused reformed Protestantism more generally: they accepted the need for Sabbath observance, literacy, and religious instruction. That common ground represented the safest place for those defending Plymouth to stand.

In the end, the confrontation persuaded some Adventurers to withdraw their support on the grounds that the Plymouth faithful remained “Brownists.” The term, referencing early English separatist Robert Browne, was not a compliment. Indeed, the disgruntled Adventurers asserted that they would “sine against god in building up such a people.”Footnote ⁶⁰ The Leiden church, in seeking permission to go to America, had presented itself to the king and the Adventurers in a way that deemphasized its separatism. Accentuating Robinson’s moderation and equating their church with the practices of French Huguenots, the Leiden community dissembled slightly. While the French Protestants did not overtly object to bishops, they were prevented from having them by their marginal status in France – so Leiden believers could equate the two church orders to give a reassuring impression, sidestepping the differences between their own practices and those of the Church of England.Footnote ⁶¹ The Adventurers who continued to abide by their obligation claimed that their irate co-investors sought any excuse to disassociate themselves from the settlement.Footnote ⁶² While Bradford and Winslow denied the accusations that they wanted none to live among them save separatists and that they held non-separatists in “distaste,” they ultimately could not dismiss some allegations.Footnote ⁶³ The church gave itself away when it rejected common practices for which its leaders could find no warrant in the Word of God. When they could not deny or explain away, they took the high ground and revealed their disagreements with the accepted practices within English Protestantism.

The controversy climaxed in a dramatic confrontation in England, in which the church and its accusers faced off before the Adventurers. In the “trial” which took place presumably in London in late 1624 or early 1625, moderators were appointed to represent the two sides, with Thomas Hooker (later of Connecticut fame) representing Plymouth.Footnote ⁶⁴ Edward Winslow, who was in England defending Plymouth’s interests, had been accused of maligning Lyford. Captain Pierce was also present and supported the plantation. In the session, which drew a sizeable crowd, accusations were aired and addressed. The highlight, however, had to be the startling revelations about Lyford’s past. Winslow received a tip to investigate his time in Ireland, which revealed him to be – as one scholar put it – “a lecherous hypocrite.”Footnote ⁶⁵ If anything, that characterization was too gentle: a serial rapist, Lyford left his previous post after assaulting a young woman sent to him by a prospective husband who asked him for advice about whether she appeared a worthy wife for a godly man. After raping her, Lyford then declared her acceptable as his parishioner’s bride. When the woman subsequently revealed the assault, the church censured and drove him out. Lyford had already brought a bastard child into his own household, having initially denied the rumors of his past dalliance to his then prospective wife. His wife eventually confided to those in Plymouth that he routinely assailed their maids, even when these servants slept at the foot of the couple’s bed (and she herself was present). Winslow, who had been chastised for characterizing Lyford as a knave, was vindicated by these revelations.Footnote ⁶⁶

Besides the long arm of English authorities unhappy with American religious practices, this incident encapsulated numerous problems with transplanting Reformation. Most obviously, Plymouth had trouble – until the deluge of clerics that began in 1629 – finding a suitable man to serve their church. The core church members wanted Robinson, but he refused to migrate without all those within the congregation who wanted to go. His position pushed up the expense of sending him, which dampened the interest of the investors in shouldering that added burden. Some of the Adventurers may have thought that Lyford – who was on hand and who only required the investment of transporting his household – was a suitable compromise. The Adventurers may have thought Lyford a suitable substitute, given his previous willingness to serve the Irish Protestant church which tended to more vigorous reform than the English church.

For his part, Lyford may have been the first scandalous English cleric to enter the wider Atlantic hoping to escape his past, but he would not be the last. He hoped to take advantage of the distance that inhibited the circulation of information about his history, and he might have succeeded if he and Oldham had not waged an attack on the Plymouth church order. His efforts called attention to himself and ultimately brought out his story. Had Plymouth not been trying to keep the office of minister open for Robinson, the church might have named Lyford before the news of the scandal broke. Even when his past and his efforts to undermine Plymouth with his transatlantic denunciations had been revealed, some church members wanted to forgive his transgression and allow him to re-enter the church. In this case, however, repentance did not earn a clergyman with a history of sexual assault reincorporation into the religious community. He was exiled for his attack on the church and what Edward Winslow called his knavery.

The controversy also revealed how an Atlantic location, although it could not entirely hide alternate religious practices, created a buffer for those pursuing illegal or unconventional options. The Plymouth church did as its leaders thought best but at the same time tried to conceal any divergences from accepted practices. The distance that made the church potential prey for Lyford also gave it room to maneuver towards its own ends. As the only church in town, the Leiden-derived Plymouth church may have accorded membership somewhat selectively, leaving some people out. Yet it objected to the seemingly obvious solution that Lyford, Oldham, and company offered when they moved to start a more broadly inclusive parish church as an alternative to the church already founded in Plymouth. The Plymouth members objected that they acted in secret and that Lyford as a member of their church had an obligation to speak to them before making such a move. It seems unlikely, however, that the Plymouth church would have accepted the formation of an alternative had it been pursued more openly. They wanted religious homogeneity, and on their own terms. They preferred a mixed community in one church rather than the proliferation of alternatives beyond. This dilemma lay at the heart of the Reformation project everywhere.

Returning to my title: “Reworking Reformation in the early English Atlantic” refers not only to what the people of early Plymouth – or some of them – tried to do. It alludes as well to our own work of reconsideration. Scholars gleefully break down national myths: religious liberty or harmonious intercultural relations make tempting targets. Yet while we overturn old verities, we persist in our own habitual thinking. We view religion as portable, picked up like luggage and carried unchanged to a new location. We treat religious identities as complete entities, likely to appear recognizably themselves in any location. When a fragment of the Leiden church boarded the Mayflower, did they carry a separatist alternative to America? Scholars have always assumed so, placing Plymouth’s history within the Bradford narrative that drew a line from Scrooby all the way through to New England. That narrative supports the assumption that Reformation converged with mobility in order to allow refugees to move with and thereby protect their faith. Looking closely at one small religious community, we can see how easily that goal could be thwarted. Even the best-known colonies – the easily categorized places – in practice had complex and contingent relationships to their purported identities. Plymouth came into being not as a transplanted Leiden church but as a mixed community struggling to create common ground, debating anew all the issues of Reformation that we assume they had settled long before. Dubbed “pilgrims” later to capture their status as exiles, they have been made to carry the weight of religious purity and commitment. They have also been held up as “not Massachusetts” for those looking for tolerance and piety. The burden may be too great for them to bear.