Thomas Lechford's Plain Dealing: Censorship and Cosmopolitan Print Culture in the English Atlantic

Whether they concern metropolitan London or colonial New England, histories of the print culture of the seventeenth-century English reform movement typically conceive of the printed word as the site of a power struggle with the civil state. While England and the Massachusetts Bay Colony are understood to have had different interests in censoring print publications, and different techniques for doing so, both are seen as having regulated print in an attempt to control a heterogeneous reformation movement that threatened social order with oppositional and dissenting religious views.¹ The longstanding body of scholarly work on censorship has revealed how the process of book production was shaped by complex and covert acts of opposition on the part of authors and publishers, and it has described the English print culture that emerged in the Netherlands and reached readers in London and in New England through unlicensed printing and smuggling.² More recently, as scholars have begun to conceive of English print culture in a broadly construed Atlantic world, they have also begun to consider how the simple fact of transatlantic travel offered opportunities for eluding state controls. Hugh Amory, for example, has noted that while many reformers emigrated to America to escape the persecution of Archbishop William Laud, they later "had to remove themselves bodily from New England to break into print" after equally running afoul of colonial authorities.³ In his work on print publication and religious dissent in early New England, Jonathan Beecher Field has described how dissenters such as Roger Williams, Samuel Gorton, and John Clarke made claims for political recognition by traveling to England to publish books for the benefit of the administrative bodies that awarded charters and land grants to American colonies.⁴ While not displacing the account of an English print sphere structured around censoring authorities at either end of the colonial world, this to-and-fro movement of many writers suggests that scholars should consider further how the history of the book has been shaped by the publication possibilities afforded by taking to ship. When colonists extended debates about church and state across the Atlantic, long-distance movement emerged as a publication outlet.

This essay draws on this recent scholarship to recover a colonial book that has fallen through the cracks of book histories organized around local censorship laws, Thomas Lechford's Plain dealing; or, News from New England. Composed in Boston and in London, and printed in London by Nathaniel Butter in two editions (1642, 1644), Plain Dealing is a report on colonial civil and ecclesiastical institutions published by Lechford upon his remigration to England in 1641 after having fallen out with Bay Colony authorities.⁵ Lechford has been viewed by scholars as a minor theological dissenter when compared with figures such as Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams, and Plain Dealing has been grouped with the wave of diatribes against the Massachusetts Bay Colony that began to appear in the emerging parliamentary culture of London in the early 1640s.⁶ In fact, Lechford's career and the story of his book are more complex, and cannot be easily assimilated to accounts of colonial religious dissent or metropolitan pamphlet wars, important contexts though those may be. Indeed, Lechford was at separate times the target of censorship on both sides of the Atlantic, running afoul of Anglican authorities for his involvement with William Prynne in 1635, and experiencing repeated official censure during his stay in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. I argue here that Lechford's travels represent less his wavering religious commitments than his affiliation with what the historian Louise Breen has described as a mobile group of "cosmopolitan Puritans" who "evinced . . . greater concern for the spread of right religion in the world at large than the particular fate of the Massachusetts Bay colony or its specific (and in their view unduly narrow) form of orthodoxy."⁷ According to Breen, for many Puritans, the Massachusetts Bay Colony competed with revolutionary London as well as with other colonial destinations as a possible site for building the true church on earth. In their conflicts with Bay Colony...