Godly Republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims, and a City on a Hill by Michael P. Winship (review)

What’s in a title? At a time of political deadlock in both the House and the Senate, Michael P. Winship’s intellectual tour de force will surprise and delight those to whom the book’s title had suggested divine approval of the GOP across the ages by the allegedly conservative founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The term republicanism (definitely with a small “r”) is something of a misnomer and an anachronism—or so it seems. As slippery as the equally elusive puritanism, the designation republicanism would have alarmed Elizabethan proto-Puritans as much as their Stuart comperes who migrated to New England before the English Civil War. If we consult the vade mecum on political theory of the day, French political philosopher and monarchist Jean Bodin’s Les Six Livres de la République (French, 1576; Latin, 1586; English, 1606), we might be surprised to discover that the jurist used république in a rather generic sense: states in which the relationship between ruler, aristocrats, and commoners is neither despotic nor tyrannical, neither protoaristocratic nor democratic. Whatever the teeth of this leviathan, the idiom république created enough discomfort among English readers that its translator Richard Knolles turned the title of Bodin’s masterpiece into The Six Bookes of a Commonweale (London, 1606): “Commonwealth,” not “Republic.” The dangerous terms republic and republicanism spawned among those in power a deep-seated fear of antimonarchicalism, of radical levelers driving the commonwealth into the quagmire of a “status popularis.” Such a popular state of affairs would turn the world upside down. Even John Cotton, one of the Bay’s leading codifiers of the New England Way, anxiously reassured his aristocratic sponsors with Bodin at his elbow: “Democracy, I do not conceyve that ever God did ordeyne as a fitt government eyther for church or commonwealth. If the people be governors, who shall be governed? As for monarchy, and aristocracy, they are both of them clearly approoved, and directed in scripture, yet so as referreth the soveraigntie to himselfe, and setteth up Theocracy in both, as the best forme of government in the commonwealth, as well as in the church” (Sargent Bush, Jr., The Correspondence of John Cotton, University of North Carolina Press, 2001, 245).

Even as late as the Federalist debates in the newly independent United States of America, this slippery term of statecraft frustrated President John Adams: “There is not a more unintelligible word in the English language than republicanism,” he complained to the American historian and playwright Mercy Otis Warren in 1807. “Neither yourself, nor the General, have ever condescended to commit yourselves to any definition of it, and I venture to say you dare not attempt it to this hour” (Charles F. Adam, ed., The Correspondence of John Adams and Mercy Otis Warren, 1878, repr. Arno Press, 1972, 432). Professor Winship readily admits that “the term ‘republicanism’ itself was not employed at the time” of the early Stuart monarchy. He also acknowledges that “the early Massachusetts Congregationalists and their English Presbyterian forebears would have called their churches ‘biblical,’ not ‘republican’” (4, 5). Clearly, then, given this potential for misunderstanding, we must resist the all-too-likely temptation to read modern conceptions of republicanism back into the founding period of Puritan New England—even if it proves to be a handy docket to examine the links between Puritanism and secular political thought.

To be sure, Winship is one of the foremost scholars on things Puritan, and his Godly Republicanism is authoritative in every respect. Divided into ten densely documented chapters, the book traces in its first half the fermentation of political thought and the influence of radical ideas on church government among Stuart Anglicans, Presbyterians, and conforming, nonconforming, and congregational Puritans, as well as among radical and moderate Separatists. The divisive debates between the English Presbyterian Thomas Cartwright, the prelatical John Whitgift, radical Separatists Robert Browne, Henry Jacob, and John Robinson, and Congregationalists Henry...