[534] The first two deacons of the church at Charlestown were Robert Hale and Ralph Monsall. The Charlestown church, however, was not organized until November, 1632, sixteen months after Ratcliff’s punishment. (Budington’s First Church of Charlestown, pp. 31, 34.)
The Boston church in June, 1631, had but one deacon, William Aspinwall (Ellis’s First Church of Boston, p. 328), in regard to whom there is a detailed note in Savage’s Winthrop (p. *32). He was the deacon of the Charlestown church at the time Morton was arraigned and punished, and it is possible that Morton refers to him as Shackles. Aspinwall was a man of prominence in the settlement; but it must be remembered that, thirteen years later, “two of our ministers’ sons, being students in the college, robbed two dwelling-houses in the night of some pounds. Being found out, they were ordered by the gouvernours of the college to be there whipped, which was performed by the president himself—yet they were about 20 years of age.” (Winthrop, vol. ii. p. *166.) If the president of the college could officiate at the whipping-post in 1644, in a case of what Winthrop calls “burglary,” there seems no good reason why the deacon of the church should not have officiated there in 1631 in a case which the same authority calls “foul, scandalous invectives against our churches.”
[536] The character of the New Canaan as a political pamphlet of the time, intended to effect a given result in a particular quarter, has already been referred to. (Supra, pp. 68-9.) In this respect the present chapter is the most significant one in the book. It was intended to act on the well-known prejudices of Archbishop Laud, the head and controlling spirit of that Board of Lords Commissioners of Foreign Plantations which then had supreme authority over the colonies. To that Board Morton dedicated his book; and at the time he was writing it the Lords Commissioners, and especially the Archbishop, were taking active measures to vacate the Massachusetts charter and to assume the direct government of the colonies. It is its connection with these facts which alone gives any great degree of historical value to the present chapter. In itself it is not deserving of careful annotation, as it contains nothing that is new, and the ground is much better covered by Lechford in his Plaine Dealing. Like Morton, Lechford was a lawyer; and, unlike Morton, he was by nature a devout man. A member of the Church of England he has given in his book a remarkably vivid and fair-minded description of the practice of the New England churches during the earliest days of the settlement. Mr. Trumbull’s very learned and elaborate notes to his edition of the Plaine Dealing, which is the edition referred to in the notes to the present chapter, have cleared up Lechford’s text wherever it is obscure; and they obviate the necessity of any careful annotation of the present chapter, except where it is desirable to call notice to the special bearing any particular assertion made may be supposed to have had on Archbishop Laud’s idiosyncrasies.
[537] “Teaching in the church publicly,” was, it will be remembered, one of the offences charged against Winslow before the Lords Commissioners at the hearing of 1634, for which, at Archbishop Laud’s “vehement importunity,” he was committed to the Fleet. (Supra, 69; Proc. Mass. Hist. Soc., 1860-2, p. 131.) On the real practice of the New England churches in regard to the exercise of their gifts by lay members, see Plaine Dealing, p. 42.
[538] “I suppose the first preacher that ever thus preached with notes in our New-England was the Reverend Warham.” (Magnalia, B. III. part 2, ch. xviii.) In regard to John Warham, first of Dorchester and subsequently of Windsor, Connecticut, see Dr. Young’s note in Chron. of Mass., p. 347.
[539] There probably never was any regularly chosen deaconess in New England. The office was recognized as having come down from the primitive churches (Dexter’s Congregationalism, p. 69); and Robert Browne in his definitions, in the Life and Manners of all true Christians, says: “The widow is a person having office of God to pray for the church, and to visit and minister to those which are afflicted and distressed in the church; for the which she is tried and received as meet.” (Bacon’s Genesis of the New England Churches, p. 84.) Bradford in his Dialogue, written in 1648, speaking of the Separatist church at Amsterdam, says, that besides the pastor, teacher, elders and deacons, there was “one ancient widow for a deaconess, who did them service many years, though she was sixty years of age when she was chosen. She honored her place and was an ornament to the congregation. She usually sat in a convenient place in the congregation, with a little birchen rod in her hand, and kept little children in great awe from disturbing the congregation. She did frequently visit the sick and weak, especially women, and, as there was need, called out maids and young women to watch and do them other helps as their necessity did require; and if they were poor, she would gather relief for them of those that were able, or acquaint the deacons; and she was obeyed as a mother in Israel and an officer of Christ.” (Young’s Chron. of Pilg., p. 455.) It would be inferred from the passage quoted that there had in 1648 never been a deaconess in the Plymouth church, as in this Dialogue the old men are supposed to be describing to the young men events strange to the latter, as having occurred long before. Lechford says, speaking of the Massachusetts colony: “No church there has a Deaconesse, as far as I know.” (Plaine Dealing, pp. 24, 40) “I have not met with an instance of [the] actual institution [of the office of deaconess] in New England.” (Palfrey, vol. ii. p. 37, note.)
It does not seem, however, to have been even theoretically one of the functions of the deaconess “to use her gifts at home,” as Morton says, “in an assembly of her sex, by way of repetition, or exhortation.” This would rather have pertained to the office of teacher. Meetings of females, such as those described, were held in the parishes during the early days, and played an important part in the Antinomian controversy. The deaconess did not, however, officiate at them. The character of these meetings appears in the following passage at the trial of Mrs. Hutchinson:
“Court. ... What say you to your weekly public meetings? Can you find a warrant for them?
Mrs. Hutchinson. I will show you how I took it up. There were such meetings in use before I came; and because I went to none of them, this was the special reason of my taking up this course. We began it with but five or six, and, though it grew to more in future time, yet, being tolerated at the first, I knew not why it might not continue.
Court. There were private meetings indeed, and are still in many places, of some few neighbors; but not so public and frequent as yours; and are of use for increase of love and mutual edification. But yours are of another nature. If they had been such as yours they had been evil, and therefore no good warrant to justify yours. But answer by what authority or rule you uphold them?
Mrs. H. By Titus ii. 3-5, where the elder women are to teach the younger.
Court. So we allow you to do, as the Apostle there means, privately and upon occasion. But that gives no warrant of such set meetings for that purpose. And, besides, you take upon you to teach many that are older than yourself. Neither do you teach them that which the Apostle commands, viz: to keep at home.
Mrs. H. Will you please to give me a rule against it, and I will yield.
Court. You must have a rule for it, or else you cannot do it in faith. Yet you have a plain rule against it,—‘I suffer not a woman to teach.’ (I. Tim. ii. 12.)
Mrs. H. That is meant of teaching men.”
(Weld’s Short Story, pp. 34-5.) See also the version to the same effect in Hutchinson’s Massachusetts, vol. ii. pp. 484-7.
[540] Supra, 262, note 3, and 306, note 3. The effect such a statement as that in the text would have upon Archbishop Laud is apparent. The real practice of the early New England churches in the matter of ordination can be found in the Plaine Dealing, pp. 13, 16, 17.
[541] “There hath been some difference about jurisdictions, or cognizance of causes: Some have held that, in causes betweene brethren of the Church, the matter should be first told the Church, before they goe to the civill Magistrate, because all causes in difference doe amount, one way or other, to a matter of offence; and that all criminall matters concerning Church members, should be first heard by the Church. But these opinionists are held, by the wiser sort, not to know the dangerous issues and consequences of such tenets.” (Plaine Dealing, p. 34.)
[542] There was no minister at Plymouth in the spring of 1628, when Morton was there. William Brewster was the ruling elder in the church and officiated in its pulpit, where, from the beginning, he had “taught twice every sabbath, and that both powerfully and profitably, to the great contentment of the hearers, and their comfortable edification.” (Young’s Chron. of Pilg., p. 467; Bradford, pp. 187-8.) In the summer of 1628, but after Morton had been sent to England, Allerton brought over Mr. Rogers as a preacher, who soon proved to be “crased in his braine” (Bradford, p. 243), and the next season was sent home. In the autumn, apparently, of 1629, and while Morton may have been at Plymouth at Allerton’s house (Ib. p. 253), before his final return to Mount Wollaston, the Rev. Ralfe Smith, who had come over with Skelton and Higginson in the previous June (Young’s Chron. of Mass., p. 151), was found at Nantasket and brought down to Plymouth. (Bradford, p. 263.) He was not, however, chosen into the ministry there until a later time. (Ib.) It is unlikely that Morton here refers to Plymouth personages. He was at Salem in 1629 (Supra, 306), and in Boston, where as a prisoner he was undoubtedly made regularly to attend divine service, from early September to the end of December, 1630. (Supra, 45; Young’s Chron. of Mass., p. 321.) At Salem he had come in contact with Skelton and Higginson; and it has been seen (Supra, 300, note 1) that he probably knew something of Francis Bright of Charlestown. The only other ministers then in the colony were John Warham and John Maverick at Dorchester, George Phillips at Watertown, and John Wilson at Boston.
[543] It is scarcely necessary to point out that the three following pages are largely the fruit of Morton’s imaginative powers, and were intended for the special edification of Archbishop Laud. As Plymouth was much less well supplied with preachers than the towns of the Massachusetts colony, it is altogether probable—as Dr. John Eliot surmised, in his review of the New Canaan, in the Monthly Anthology for July, 1810—the allusions to the church-practises in this chapter found their largest basis of fact in incidents which Morton had been a witness of in the Plymouth meeting-house. It is safe to add, however, that he could have had no agreeable recollections of the meeting-houses at Boston and Charlestown.
[544] Oliver Le Daim, barber of Louis XI., created by him Comte de Meulan, and sent in 1477 on a confidential mission to Mary of Burgundy at Ghent. The account of his experiences is to be found in the Memoires de Commines, L. v. ch. xiv.
[546] I am indebted to Mr. Lindsay Swift, of the Boston Public Library, for the following explanation of this, to me, very perplexing allusion: “Nic, or, more correctly, nick,—namely, ‘a raised or indented bottom in a beer-can, by which the customers were cheated, the nick below and the froth above filling up part of the measure.’ I take this definition from Wright’s Dictionary of Obsolete and Provincial English. That the expression was a common one the following quotations prove:—
(Spurious lines added to Rand’s 1624 edition of Skelton’s Elynour Rummynge.) Most of this information I have taken from Nares’s Glossary and Halliwell-Phillipp’s Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, second edition.”
[547] The reference here is apparently to the running footmen much in use in the eighteenth century, and also, judging by the text, as early as the reign of Charles I. Their duty was to run before and alongside the cumbrous coaches then in use, to notify innkeepers of the coming guests. They carried long poles to assist them in clearing obstacles, and to help pry the carriages out of the sloughs in which they frequently got stuck. (Brewer’s Dict. of Phrase and Fable, p. 773; Macaulay’s England, vol. i. pp. 374-8.)
[548] It was one of the doctrines of Pythagoras that the souls of the dying passed into the air, and thence into the living bodies of other men, taking controlling possession of them. That the nimbleness of the father’s feet might thus account for the volubility of the son’s tongue is, it is needless to say, a purely Mortonian deduction.
[549] “May 12. [1621] was the first marriage in this place, which, according to the laudable custome of the Low-Countries, in which they had lived, was thought most requisite to be performed by the magistrate, as being a civill thing, upon which many questions aboute inheritances doe depende, with other things most proper to their cognizans, and most consonante to the scripturs. Ruth 4. and no wher found in the gospell to be layed on the ministers as a part of their office.” (Bradford, p. 101.) The marriage here referred to was that of Edward Winslow to Mrs. Susannah White. It took place in May, Winslow’s wife having died seven weeks before, and Mrs. White’s husband, William, twelve weeks before. That he had married people was, it will be remembered, the other of the two charges advanced against Winslow himself, at the Privy Council hearing just referred to. (Supra, 322, note 2.) The practice of civil marriage already prevailed in the Massachusetts colony also, as, a week before the arrest of Morton was ordered, Governor Endicott, on August 18, 1630, was married, at Charlestown apparently, “by the governour and Mr. Wilson.” (Winthrop, vol. i. p. *30. See also Plaine Dealing, pp. 86-7.) There are few more edifying examples of the casuistical skill of Winthrop and his associates than is afforded by his method of dealing with the question of civil marriages, as explained in detail in his Journal (vol. i. p. *323). “In our church discipline, and in matters of marriage, to make a law that marriages should not be solemnized by ministers is repugnant to the laws of England; but to bring it to a custom by practice for the magistrates to perform it, is no law made repugnant, etc.” The charter of 1629 empowered the General Court of the colony “to make, ordeine, and establishe all Manner of wholesome and reasonable Orders, Lawes, Statutes, and Ordinances, Directions, and Instructions, not contrary to the Lawes of theis our Realme of England.” (Hazard, vol. i. p. 252.)
[550] At the conference between the Bishops and the Puritans, held in presence of James I. at Hampton Court in January, 1603, one of the practices of the English Church especially excepted to as a “relique of popery” by Dr. John Reynolds, the spokesman of the Puritans, was the ring in marriage. (Neal’s Hist. of Puritans, vol. ii. p. 42.) Among the reasons urged against its use I have not elsewhere found the “diabolical circle” argument. It seems rather to have been associated in the Puritan mind with the Romish traditions. (Jones’s Finger-Ring Lore, pp. 288-90.) This count, in Morton’s indictment, was based on good grounds. “In the Weddings of [early] New England the ring makes none of the ceremonies.” (Mather’s Ratio Disciplinæ, p. 116.)
[551] This refers to churching practice of the English Church. At the Hampton Court conference, referred to in the preceding note, another of the “reliques of popery,” specifically excepted to by Dr. Reynolds, was “the churching of women by the name of purification.”
[552] This count in the indictment was well laid. The children of the non-communicants in early New England could not be baptized; though they might be if either one of the parents was a member of the church. At a later period this became one of the leading causes of political agitation in the colony, and is referred to in the Dr. Robert Childs petition of 1646. In 1670 from four fifths to five sixths of the adult male inhabitants of Massachusetts were without the franchise, as being non-communicants. (Lechford’s Plaine Dealing, pp. 47, 48, 151; Mem. Hist. of Boston, vol. i. p. 156; Palfrey, vol. ii. p. 8, vol. iii. p. 41.)
[554] This was the favorite epithet employed by the early reformers in referring to the Mass. Calvin called it “an execrable idol;” Hooper, “a wicked idol.” Bradford—not Governor William, but John, the Smithfield martyr of Queen Mary’s time—terms it an “abominable idol of bread;” and again, “the horriblest and most detestable device that ever the devil brought out by man.” Bland, rector of Adishan, repeated the familiar figure, calling it a “most blasphemous idol;” and Latimer improved upon this by adding the words, “full of idolatry, blasphemy, sacrilege against God and the dear sacrifice of His Christ.” (Blunt’s Reformation of the Church of Eng., vol. ii. pp. 399-402.) The derivation of the Book of Common Prayer, in many of its parts, from the Missal was unmistakable; and naturally the next race of religious reformers applied to the former the same earnest epithets of theological dissent which had before been applied to the latter. Accordingly, in Barrowe’s Brief Discovery of the False Church, we find the Book of Common Prayer referred to as “a detestable idol, ... old rotten stuff ... abstracted out of the pope’s blasphemous mass-book, ... an abominable and loathsome sacrifice in the sight of God, even as a dead dog.” Barrowe was one of the three Separatist martyrs, and as such held in deepest veneration at Plymouth. (Young’s Chron. of Pilg., pp. 427-34.) The Book of Common Prayer was therefore undoubtedly looked upon and referred to at Plymouth as Morton says. Indeed, the Lyford schism was in some degree due to its use. (Bradford, p. 181.) That it was, in the early days, also so looked upon and so referred to at Salem and at Boston, is not clear. It is true that in 1629 it was again the cause of the Browne dissension at Salem (Young’s Chron. of Mass., p. 287), in consequence of which Skelton and Higginson both declared openly “that they came away from the Common Prayer and ceremonies, ... and therefore, being in a place where they might have their liberty, they neither could nor would use them, because they judged the imposition of these things to be sinful corruptions in the worship of God.” (Morton’s Memorial, p. 147.) The Puritans of Boston, however, were not Separatists, and it is open to question whether they at first felt towards the Common Prayer as the Plymouth people felt towards it, and as Morton says. In 1640 Governor Winthrop, it is true, noted it as a thing worthy of observation that his son “having many books in a chamber where there was corn of divers sorts, had among them one wherein the Greek testament, the psalms and the common prayer were bound together. He found the common prayer eaten with mice, every leaf of it, and not any of the two other touched, nor any other of his books, though they were above a thousand.” (Winthrop, vol. ii. p. *20.) When Governor Winthrop tried and sentenced Morton, however, he was anxious to preserve his connection with the Church of England, and it is very doubtful whether he then looked upon its Book of Prayer as “an idol.” (Proc. Mass. Hist. Soc., vol. xviii. p. 296.)
As one count in Morton’s indictment of the people of New England, that in the text now under consideration was not only sufficiently well founded, but it was peculiarly calculated to excite Archbishop Laud’s anger. It is unnecessary to say that he was the special champion of the Church of England ritual. To enforce exact conformity to it he regarded as his mission. When the ships loaded with emigrants for New England were, in March, 1634, stopped in the Thames by order of the Privy Council, they were not allowed to proceed on their voyage until the masters bound themselves to have the Book of Common Prayer used at morning and evening service during the voyage. (Council Register, Feb. 21, 28, 1634; Gardiner’s Charles I., vol. ii. p. 23.) This was Laud’s act, and it is more than probable that he was as much influenced by Morton on that occasion as he was subsequently in the matter of Winslow’s imprisonment for having performed the marriage ceremony. (Supra, 69, 93.)
[555] “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith.” (Matt. xxiii. 23.)
“But woe unto you, Pharisees! for ye tithe mint and rue and all manner of herbs, and pass over judgment and the love of God.” (Luke xi. 42.)
The significance of the text referred to lay, of course, in Morton’s mind, rather in its indirect than its direct application,—more in its denunciatory than in its contributory portions. The clergy in early Massachusetts were supported by the voluntary contributions in Boston, and by a regular town-tax levy outside of Boston. (Plaine Dealing, pp. 48-50; Proc. Mass. Hist. Soc., 1860-2, p. 116.)
[557] “Wink, v. n. 1. to shut the eyes. obs.” (Worcester.)
[558] Edward Howes, in writing from London to John Winthrop, Jr., in November, 1632, describes how, on going home at noon one day, he met the master of a vessel which had just arrived from New England, together with three others who had come over with him. The master passing into the house on some matter of business, Howes had a talk with one of the other men, whom he describes as an “egregious knave.” The report given by this man of the Massachusetts community strikingly resembles that given by Morton in this chapter. He would, writes Howes, “give none of you a good word, but the governor [Winthrop]; he was a good man and kept a good table, but all the rest were Hereticks, and they would be more holy than all the world; they would be a peculiar people to God, but go to the Devil; that one man with you being at confession, as he called it, said he believed his father and mother and ancestors went all to Hell; and that your preachers, in their public prayers, pray for the governor before they pray for our king and state; ... that you never use the Lord’s prayer; that your ministers marry none; that fellows which keep hogs all the week preach on the Sabbath; that every town in your plantation is of a several religion; that you count all men in England, yea all out of your church, in the state of damnation. But I believe and know better things of you; but here you may partly see how the Devil stirs up his instruments.” (IV. Mass. Hist. Col., vol. vi. p. 485.)
[559] Mr. Swift (Supra, 328, note) suggests that Morton here alludes to the scene in Ben Jonson’s Tale of a Tub (act iv. sc. 1), where Justice Preamble says:
Turfe answers him:
Here the Countryman makes the remark, and not the Justice; but a wholly correct allusion by Morton is not to be looked for. (Supra, 123, note 2.) The meaning of hab, nab is, of course, “hit or miss, at a venture, at random,” and is probably derived from habbe, nabbe,—“to have or not to have.” (See Nares’s Glossary.)
[562] By the General Court of May, 1644, it was ordered, that “Nantascot shall be called Hull.” (Records, vol. ii. p. 74.) Mr. Savage, in his notes to Winthrop (vol. ii. p. *175), and Mr. Whitmore (Proc. Mass. Hist. Soc. 1871-3, p. 397), think it was so called from Hull in Yorkshire. It would appear from the text that it had been locally known by that name among the “old planters” before the settlement of Boston.
[563] Sir Christopher Gardiner suddenly appeared in Massachusetts in May, 1630, and returned to England in 1632, arriving there in August. He is supposed to have come out as an agent, or emissary, of Sir Ferdinando Gorges. I had begun the preparation of a note on Sir Christopher, and “how hee spedd amongst the Seperatists,” for insertion at this point; but the subject developed on my hands until it assumed the shape of a study by itself. It can be found in the Proceedings of the Mass. Hist. Soc. for January, 1883, vol. xx.
[564] Machiavelli died in 1527, and The Prince was published in 1532. The reputation of the man and of the book were as well established in Morton’s day as they are now.
This derivation is not accepted by the authorities. See Brewer’s Dict., p. 614.
[566] As Saint Michael is one of the Azores, it may have been during this voyage that Morton visited the Isle of Sal and the tropics, as mentioned in the first chapter of the New Canaan. (Supra, 117.) If the voyage did last nine months, it was August or September, 1631, before he got back to England.
There are in the New Canaan (Supra, 280, 297) two references to certain imaginary or special gifts from “Phaos box,” which in editing I had been unable to explain. Mr. Lindsay Swift (Supra, 328, note) now supplies me with a reference, which, if it is indeed, as seems most probable, the allusion which Morton had in mind, seems to indicate that his familiarity with classic authors was greater than I have been disposed to give him credit for. The reference is to the Varia Historia of Ælianus (lib. XII. cap. xviii.), and reads as follows: “Phaonem, omnium hominum formosissimum, Venus in lactucis abscondit. Alii dicunt, eum portitorem fuisse, et habuisse hoc vitæ genus. Veniebat autem aliquando Venus, trajicere volens; ille vero, nesciens quænam esset, libenter recepit, magnaque cura, quoquo voluerat, eam vexit. Pro quibus meritis Dea alabastrum ei donavit, et erat in eo unguentum, quo unctus Phaon speciosissimus hominum evasit, atque adeo amarunt eum Mitylenensium feminæ. Tandem vero deprehensus in adulterio, trucidatus est.”