First Founders: American Puritans and Puritanism in an Atlantic World

John Endecott: Godly Magistrate

John Endecott Godly Magistrate When we think of the lay leaders of early New England the name that first springs to mind is that of John Winthrop. But before Winthrop there was John Endecott, who was sent to the New World by the leaders of the New England Company in 1628 to lay the foundations for the puritan experiment in America. After 1630, Endecott became a loyal lieutenant to his friend and colleague Winthrop, and after the latter’s death in 1649 it was Endecott to whom the colonists turned to lead them through the trials of the 1650s and early 1660s. As a local magistrate and then again as a colony leader, he sought to work with New England’s clergy and his fellow lay leaders to shape the godly kingdom that he had committed himself to. A soldier of the Lord, he was always zealous in his pursuit of what he was persuaded to be God’s will. T he puritan view of the godly magistrate was set forth in England in numerous sermons and speeches, nowhere better than in 1618, when the clergyman samuel Ward addressed the suffolk magistrates at the annual Assizes. John Winthrop, who had been added to the suffolk County Commission in 1615, was among those present to hear the sermon. Ward stressed the importance of a magistrate serving the common good rather than his own self-interest. Magistrates, according to Ward, needed to be men of ability, God fearing and truthful . He was critical of the “politician of our times, learned in the wisdom of the newer state, and acquainted with the mysteries of the market, that knows how to improve things to the best for his own time and turn, and to let the common body shift for itself.” He reminded the magistrates that “offices are not livings and salaries, but charges and duties” and 30 First Founders criticized those who “come into them and execute them not with a mind of doing good, but of domineering; not of providing for others’ welfare, but for their own.” Ward was calling for a kingdom of God built through the efforts of magistrates who had internalized puritan values and who sought to cooperate with godly clergy. He was not calling for a theocracy run by clerics . Civil affairs were to be run at the county level by godly magistrates functioning in their formal capacities as justices of the peace. In local communities pious town officials were to institute a culture of discipline that would bend people toward godly behavior. This included regulating the number of alehouses, supervising markets, tending for the poor and John Endecott Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical society John Endecott 31 infirm, and punishing breaches of the peace. The role of the clergy was to meet formally and informally with civil leaders to provide advice as to how godly values should be applied to the broader society. such cooperation was the pattern that Endecott and his fellow colonial leaders sought to put into practice in the New World. while the pilGrim separatists had founded the Plymouth Colony in 1620, the first true effort to build a puritan society in America was taken in June of 1628 when the New England Company sent John Endecott to take control of colonial settlements that had first been established as fishing outposts, and whose settlers had been consolidated at Naumkeag, which the colonists renamed salem. Endecott was himself one of the six original patentees of the New England Company, and one of those who had been willing “to engage their persons in the Voyages” as opposed to simply directing the affairs from England. Charged with governing the colony, he departed from England on the Abigail, accompanied by fifty or more fellow planters and their servants. He was described by those who sent him as “a man well known to divers persons of good part,” and a contemporary who came to know him in New England referred to him as “a fit instrument to begin this wilderness work, [a man] of courage, bold, undaunted, yet sociable, and of a cheerful spirit, applying himself . . . as occasion served.” Though he would become one of the most significant figures in seventeenth-century New England, Endecott’s life prior to emigrating is shrouded in mystery. It is believed he was born in England in the Armada year of 1588. It is likely that he was from the southwest...