Heads Must Roll: The Dynamics of Radical Puritanism in Stuart England and Early New England

On the cold late January day in 1649 when Charles I was executed, he may have spent his final moments remembering how, when he became king in 1625, courtiers and bishops in the Church of England began to warn him about the “seditious” intentions of the “puritans.” Or perhaps he remembered that in his father’s reflections on kingship, Basilikon Doron (1598), he had singled out “puritans” as a threat to the monarchy. Certainly, James had strong feelings about the Presbyterian scheme of “parity” of rank for all ministers, which he regarded as a dagger aimed at the heart of the royal supremacy. So he reportedly told a group of bishops who gathered for the Hampton Court conference in early 1604. “If once you were out,” he remarked, “and they [meaning, extremist Presbyterians] in place, I know what would become of my Supremacy. No bishop, no king.” Two months later, he described Puritans as those “impatient to suffer any superiority, which maketh their sect unable to be suffered in any well governed Commonwealth.”¹ What the father took for granted had, for the son and his circle of allies, swollen into a rhetoric of the Puritan as conspirator bent on ending the royal supremacy in matters of religion and curtailing the royal prerogative in civil affairs. Forewarned, Charles had lived to see the specter of conspiracy mutate into revolution—and, in January 1649, into regicide.

Yet how credible is the figure of the Puritan as revolutionary? It seems unwise to trust Charles’ informants and regard the Puritan movement as infused with radical political ideas, for the rhetoric of these men is a pitch-perfect example of the binaries that were so characteristic of political and cultural discourse in seventeenth-century England. If we agree with the late Patrick Collinson (The Elizabethan Puritan Movement [1967]) that the movement is best understood as part of a broadly defined center or mainstream in the Church of England, the case for radicalism virtually disappears. By his reckoning, the goal of the movement was to take over the state church and administer it with the support of the Crown. To this end, the movement emphasized unity and obedience almost as much as those in power did, for the crosscurrents of the English Reformation under Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Mary Tudor had taught the self-styled “godly” that the security of Protestantism rested on a Protestant monarch who would guard the Church against its Catholic enemies at home and abroad. Profuse in their declarations of loyalty to Elizabeth, James, and Charles, although ever hopeful that the monarchy would endorse the reforms they were proposing—such as shedding aspects of worship left over from Catholicism, tightening up the practice of moral discipline, curtailing some of the abuses surrounding the appointment of clergy—the Puritan party could count on the sympathies of several bishops, up to a point—that point being the suggestion that episcopacy give way to Presbyterianism. Along the same lines, Conrad Russell and other historians of Parliament under the early Stuarts have demonstrated that it never contained a Puritan party with a well–thought-out alternative to monarchy. Tensions, yes, and loose talk on all sides of conspiracy. But rhetoric was not reality except in the special sense of having the capacity to affect how people understood (or thought they understood) what was happening. To be sure, the leaders of the Church of England found it irritating that some ministers refused to conform—that is, to observe all of the rules about worship. The one issue of substance concerned church and state. In theory, Puritans wanted to temper the meaning of the royal supremacy. For them, Christ was the real head of the visible church, a principle that put limits on what the civil state could do. Yet this principle had no immediate bearing on the exercise of the royal prerogative in military and civil affairs, where...