Author: Gavin Duffy

‘Puritan’. Present the word as a Rorschach test and the responses from most questioned will be highly predictable. Sexual repression, witch burning, joyless asceticism, and an unhinged superstition will be the accusations that no doubt fall from the mouths of many. Yet in their own time the puritans of the 17^th century were no small or isolated sect, but inhabited a vast world across the Atlantic, the traverse of which constitutes a founding myth as powerful as any as that of Greece or Rome. For, given the mark they left on Old England, it was highly unlikely that they would leave untouched that of the New.

The Puritans in England

The puritans arose as a protest movement against the Religious Settlement of 1559 under Queen Elizabeth I of England. This Settlement paved the way for the Church of England’s more moderate theology which did not eschew all elements of high church Christianity, such as episcopal governance, The Book of Common Prayer, and other rituals deemed by puritans to be too Catholic. Given the distinct disparity between these arrangements and their Calvinism, it was inevitable that those of a puritan temperament were to find the Church’s half-measures as untenable.

Yet, while the puritans’ initial birth was as a religious faction of the Church of England, it was never as structured as an official movement. Nor was there a single fixed leadership or orthodoxy. For unlike other reformists, the puritans were not organised. With no self-declared of their number to be found, the term was deployed as a slur by their opponents. 

However, if there was a single galvanising factor among these varying groups, it was that theologically they were united to a greater or lesser degree by Calvinism. With the Geneva sage’s notions of double predestination and election they found their beliefs, in their own minds and in reality, had set them apart from the established Elizabethan Settlement. This theology had originally been absorbed by English exiles during the reign of the Catholic Mary I, whose rule led protestants to seek refuge in other parts of Europe such as Geneva, where they became increasingly influenced by the newly emergent theology spreading in those circles. Seeing themselves thus chosen by God as the saved, and viewing the gift of Christ’s Sacrifice as only reaching themselves—what Calvin called ‘Limited Atonement’—their ostracism was inevitable, as well as self-decreed.

On their return to England, Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury and a reformer himself, helped these newly returned protestants into influential positions and enabled their greater say in public life. Cranmer would not be a puritan himself—that movement would be a reaction to the 1604 version of his Book of Common Prayer—but he did revise it in 1552 in an attempt to excise remaining catholic ritual. The reforms of Cranmer and others with similar low church temperaments were to provide the environment in which puritanism could flourish.

Where the puritans make their mark as a distinct trend is in the political sphere of England and Great Britain. Due to their adversarial nature towards the Anglican hierarchy, the puritans obviously had a frayed relationship with the English/British monarchs of their day. The increasing move by this establishment toward a high-church Anglicanism in the 17^th century was often taken by puritans to be a resurgent crypto-Catholicism.

This nascent conflict would begin in earnest with the death of Elizabeth I, who had returned England to the Protestant faith, and with the ascension of James VI/I and the Stuarts to the throne of England. They had arrived at the turn of the 17th century, which was notoriously a time of religious conflict and turmoil across the whole of Europe. James’s Calvinist background, being from Scotland, would assure the puritans of their position in English society. However, his own leanings were actually towards Anglicanism due, primarily, to his own conflicts with the Kirk during his rule in Scotland, along with his desire to retain the seat of power in England while functioning as a sort of proto-Unionist. The succession by his son Charles would further cement the tensions between the puritans and the Anglican authorities, and see larger conflicts against the puritans and the Crown.

Charles was against the influence of puritanism in England. Puritan and High Church factions had drawn battle lines in parliament during his reign and Charles had settled on the side of people in line with his religious advisor the bishop William Laud, whose followers were dubbed Laudians. Laudians promoted ornate churches with features such as altar rails and the practice of kneeling to receive the Eucharist, both of which indicated an impression of belief in transubstantiation and reverence for church hierarchy. The puritans and presbyterians were offended by these notions and the influx of what they saw as rank Catholicism, especially as the Thirty Years War raged on in Europe. 

Puritan factions in parliament would often insist on a crypto-Catholic conspiracy having the ear of the monarch. One outburst by Francis Rous gave the house of commons a clear instruction: ‘Look into the belly and bowels of this Trojan Horse, to see if there not be men in it ready to open the gates to Romish tyranny and Spanish monarchy.’ (1)

Ultimately, Charles and Laud wanted religious conformity across the whole of the British Isles. Low Church protestants in England, Scotland, and Ireland alike were targeted during the 1630s. Having shut down parliament Charles pursued a system of personal rule, which curtailed protests of puritans and complaints against his tax policies alike. With the beginnings of arbitrary rule stirring in England—with parliament left uncalled and the political wing of the puritans neutered—the puritans would gradually move towards organised violence.

Charles I faced his first insurrection at the hands of the Scottish Covenanters, likewise Presbyterians who refused to accept such ‘Papist’ Anglican intrusions as the Book of Common Prayer on Scottish worship. Many Covenanters had seen action overseas in the armies of the Swedish Adolf Gustav in the Thirty Years war. The advanced Swedish military tactics adopted by the Covenanters managed to keep Charles’s inexperienced armies at bay, and even enabled them to occupy the city of Newcastle. Charles had initially accepted a truce, agreeing to cease any interference in the religion of Scotland. He would break this truce after failure to raise the £850 daily fee that had been agreed to fund the Covenanting Armies until they had returned to Scotland. 

Desperately in need of funds, Charles relented by finally calling a parliament in April 1640, which lasted for three weeks and is known, consequentially, as the Short Parliament. He was obliged to call it again later that same year in September, a congress since christened the Long Parliament, which would go on for thirteen years until Cromwell would later end it in 1653 (though it wouldn’t formally end for another seven). Each of these parliaments backfired on Charles, and only offered a series of grievances against him. The parliamentarians even went as far as to order the execution of the Earl of Stafford, who the puritan forces saw as a key part of a Spanish Catholic plot to take over England. The Earl of Stafford, a favourite of Charles, was eventually executed as a concession that Charles was forced to make at the threat of harm to his wife by anti-Royalist mobs, which marked parliament’s defiance against the king in blood. In addition there was a rebellion that broke out in Ireland in 1641 against the Protestant planters that had settled in the country in previous decades. The situation was drawing to a military conflict.

The events of the wars of the three kingdoms would be a large digression from the topic at hand, but a series on interconnected wars in England, Scotland, and Ireland would eventually be won by the parliamentarian faction, with Charles I’s execution for treason being carried out, and led by a number of figures, but most notably Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell had served as the MP for his birthplace of Huntingdon in Cambridgeshire during the reign of Charles I and had proved himself as an adroit commander in the Parliamentarian New Model Army. Having managed to take command of England, and after subsequent campaigns in Ireland and Scotland, all three ruled by himself as part of the Republican Commonwealth from 1653 to 1658, he had become the first leader in history to exert total control over the whole of Britain and Ireland. 

His rule was inevitably strict, and signs of supposed ‘popery’ such as the celebration of Christmas were made illegal by the puritan factions of Parliament, as the social standards of the puritan faith were intolerant of anything that was seen as extra-scriptural or a remaining pagan element allowed under previous Roman Catholic practice.

Cromwell eventually died, and after a short rule by his son Richard, Charles II was restored to the British throne along with the previous model of the Three Kingdoms. Cromwell’s rule has been seen variously as the defiance of parliament and people against absolute monarchy, a reign of oppressive socially conservative Calvinism, and as an age of brutality due to the violence perpetrated on civilians in his conquest of Ireland. The Cromwellian rule remains, nonetheless, a crucial part of the turbulent struggle between parliament and crown carried out over the 17th century in Britain and Ireland, and the impact of his legacy remains disputed.

Puritanism in America

Under the pressures of Anglican and Personal Rule, many puritans left England in search of a new life in the virgin lands of the English possessions in North America, sometimes portrayed by puritans as a ‘New Zion’.

This story begins with a puritan (although thought of as separate in modern times) faction known as the Leiden separatists, or ‘Pilgrims’  founding the town of Plymouth in Massachusetts. What would soon follow was the Massachusetts company, founded by a number of puritan-sympathising London investors to establish colonies in New England. The Massachusetts colony was relatively independent of England, being an ocean away from the turmoil of 17th century Europe, which gave the puritans more room to worship and construct a society in their own image. 

The colony had been started with a small number of refugees and had occasionally gone through times where their situation looked very precarious due to economic uncertainty and conflicts with the Pequot tribe that inhabited the area. However, the Massachusetts colony managed to create a diversified economy of crops, timber, fur, fish, and other resources. Other colonies in the Americas generally relied on single cash crops such as tobacco or cotton; and with the climate not suiting the latter and the puritans’ moral beliefs prohibiting the former, it was necessary for them to develop a more diversified economy. This gave them some resilience and stability in their life in the New World, which was seen as support from the providence of God.

The puritan colony also managed to establish strong economic links abroad. A strong trade relationship was set up with the island of Barbados, where the puritans could send their timber, crops, fish, and cloth for sugar, which was a hot commodity in the Massachusetts colony in the general form of molasses and rum, two of the puritans’ only permitted vices in moderation.

The profound role of the puritans in the forming of the early Massachusetts colony has meant that much more ink has been deployed about their legacy in the United States than in Britain. The puritan mindset has been noted by some scholars and commentators over the years as fuelling economic growth and the American entrepreneurial spirit, while the social conservatism of the puritans has been criticised during this time period. The puritans also devoted much time to the discussion of liberty, meanings of which were hotly contested, but nevertheless cemented the intrinsic freedom of the individual, community, and family in a way that was not done by others.(2)

David Hackett Fisher’s famous study Albion’s Seed which looks at the ‘folkways’ of regional British cultures and their effects upon the regional cultures of the USA, notes that the puritan colony had a low comparative crime rate to Charleston in South Carolina,(2) and notes how the Massachusetts puritan experience, in some sense, became emblematic of various ideas of America’s founding and the creation of the American national character, such as man taming the vast wilderness, entrepreneurship, and devotion to family and community, which have been drawn on in later decades by various figures. The aforementioned Protestant contribution towards free market capitalism is a link argued by the likes of Max Weber in his famous idea of the Protestant work ethic, or Brad S Gregory in his 2015 book, The Unintended Reformation.

Their legacy has not been unscathed, however. Many commentaries and depictions of the puritans have seen them as oppressive moralists, who would stamp down on even the slightest bit of merriment with an iron fist. Much criticism of the puritans focused on their supposed aversion to sexuality and the subordination of women. Centuries of depiction in fiction, from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic American novel, The Scarlet Letter, to more contemporary examples such as Roger Eggers’ 2015 historical horror film The Witch, present the puritans in this patriarchal and oppressive way, with a taboo surrounding sexual relations, and an iron boot upon the aspirations and thoughts of women as a result.

The latter film’s mention of witchcraft also ties into the puritan’s reputation for carrying out the Salem Witch Trials and executions of the late 17th century. While the influence of puritanism had severely waned since the restoration of the house of Stuart and by the time of the trials, the misconception lives on in the American imagination as feminist and other women’s interest groups investigate and utilise the history of witch hunts from their own perspectives. 

Puritan women, though expected to be subordinate to men in many respects, still held some agency as lay preachers to other women and were acknowledged as spiritually equal in receiving God’s grace and entering the Kingdom of Heaven as men were. Puritan women were even expected to play an equal role in making household decisions alongside their husbands in the Massachusetts colonies. Puritan women in England would even take an active role in politics and play a key part in the dissemination of puritan ideas amongst the people.

While the popular image of puritanism is often presented in a cartoonish way, with the puritans’ social conservatism exacerbated, and their religious devotion portrayed as outright fanaticism, the mark that they have left on two nations across the Atlantic shows the importance of their legacy, and how our very different world is yet shaped by them.

1- Hall, D The Puritans, A Transatlantic history P.215

2- Hackett Fisher Albion’s Seed p.200-201

Gavin Duffy graduated from Strathclyde University with an MSc in Historical Studies and has had a general thirst for knowledge from a very young age. His main passion turned towards history which led him to his degree and also his work in museums such as the David Livingstone Birthplace. He has a wide range of interests both academic and non-academic and has a strong belief in exploring the fullness of life and the world.