John Winthrop

by Francis J. Bremer

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The Political Thought of John Winthrop

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SOURCE: "The Political Thought of John Winthrop," in The New England Quarterly, Vol. III, October, 1930, pp. 681-705.

[Below, Gray presents an overview of Winthrop's political philosophy, stressing his reliance on the idea of the social convenant.]

God Almightie in his most holy and wise providence hath soe disposed of the Condicion of mankinde, as in all times some must be rich some poore, some highe and eminent in power and dignitie; others meane and in subieccion.

In this opening sentence of "A Modell of Christian Charity" John Winthrop reveals the bases of his political thought. The over-ruling sovereignty of God, the natural character of the inequality of men, and, most important, the benevolent implications which he drew from that inequality, are here set forth as the background of the ideas we are to examine. God has ordered "all these differences for the preservation and good of the whole"; to "manifest the work of his Spirit" in restraining the wicked, and in "exercising his graces"—"mercy, gentleness, temperance" in the "greate ones"—"faithe, patience, obedience" in the "poore and inferior sorte." We shall not understand Winthrop and his political thought unless we remember always that much of what seems arbitrary and ungentle in this man was conditioned in his mind by a never-failing sense of the Christian duty of the "greate ones"; a duty enforced by an awful sanction.

John Winthrop was born into the English squirearchy. From the time of his majority he was accustomed to magisterial authority, and the damp of a lingering feudalism yet permeated the custom of the manor of Groton. He emigrated before democratic ideas had impinged on the aristocratic tradition, while the cloud of civil war and the gruesome scene at Whitehall were unseen, unthinkable. That excessive paternalism which has ever ruled the English countryside was strong in his nature. He had been a model of "mercy, gentleness, temperance" to his own tenants, and had firmly insisted on their "patience, obedience, etc." in return. He could imagine no other order sanctioned by the word of God.

…..

The compact theory, with its roots in the Middle Ages, refurbished in time of need by the politico-religious minorities of the sixteenth century, was a familiar concept by the opening of the great century of English colonization. We need not wait for the word-battle preceding the Revolution to find American writers talking in terms of the social contract. The Revolutionary thinkers were merely drawing through Locke upon the thought of a much earlier time. Hence it is not surprising to find Winthrop asserting that

it is clearly agreed, by all, that the care of safety and welfare was the original cause or occasion of commonweales and of many familyes subjecting themselves to rulers and laws; for no man hath lawfull power over another, but by birth or consent.

Young Henry Vane dissented, on this occasion. Such a definition, he said, might do for commonweales in general; but Massachusetts was a Christian commonwealth, her government resting on a patent from the King. To which Winthrop answered:

When I describe a commonwealth in general, … the churches or Christians which are in it, fall not into consideration … for it may be a true body politicke, though there be neither church nor Christian in it. The like may be sayd for the forme of government, whether it be by patent or otherwise yet it is a government…. My intent was to prove the proprietye and priviledges of a common weale which may also belong to such government among Turkes and Pagans….

Note the secular character of this conception of the state. No medieval thinker from Augustine on would have agreed to this rejection of Christianity as an indispensable basis of the commonwealth.

Winthrop, then, like the political thinkers of eighteenth-century America, based his state upon contract. Unlike them, he drew no democratic corollaries from this basis. We have already seen the aristocratic tinge in his thought. It crops up again and again in his writings. There has remained to us the draft of a proposed bill to remedy "Common Grevances," which Winthrop and his friends drew up evidently to present to Parliament in 1624. Only a part of the paper is in Winthrop's hand, but we may reasonably take the whole document as an expression of the opinions of Winthrop himself. The section just before his pen took up the work proposes stringent laws to limit hawking privileges, and on this ground:

The difference betweene principalitie and popularie that alwaies have byn such, that from the lawe of nature order and antiquitie, a perpetuall precedencie and dominacion hath been in the one, and an invyolable lawe of conformitie and submission hath byn in thother.

In 1634 Boston elected seven men to divide the remaining lands of the town. Some prominent men were passed over, and Winthrop was barely elected; "the rest," he tells us, were "of an inferior sort." The Governor refused to serve with colleagues, and a new election was held. This time the people remembered their bounden duty to their leaders. And later, when the New England colonies confederated, the province of Sir Ferdinando Gorges was not invited to join. A village there lately "had made a taylor their mayor."

This disparity between the ranks of men is not to be regretted as a flaw in unperfected society, thinks Winthrop. It is a result of Divine beneficence. "Heerin would the Lord our God have his excellent wisdome and power appeare, that he makes (not the disparitye onely but) even the contrarietye of parts, in many bodyes, to be the meanes of the upholding and usefullnesse thereof." One is reminded of Aristotle's criticism of the unity of Plato's Republic. Winthrop owned, and presented to Harvard, the Works of Jacques Le Fevre, who wrote a paraphrase of the Politics of Aristotle. But we do not know that Winthrop ever read Le Fevre's paraphrase, and his opinion in this case is obviously founded on Christian theology.

Was this inequality of men, this disparity between the ranks of society, to remain a social fact only, or should it be translated into political terms? What class should govern, and what form should the government take?

There is no evidence that Winthrop ever questioned monarchy as a valid form of government. He left England ten years before republicanism came into existence. Deputy-Governor Dudley once refused to sign a petition of Massachusetts to the King, on the ground, said Winthrop, "that we gave the king the title of sacred majesty, which is the most proper title of princes, being the Lord's anointed…." Charles Stuart lost some of his "anointed" character for the colonists as the Civil War progressed, but we must not assume that this altered Winthrop's opinion as to monarchy in general. He died shortly after the King was executed, and we have no means of knowing what his opinion of that event was, or might have been.

Winthrop condemned democracy in strong terms. The Reformation, for him, implied neither religious toleration nor political democracy. An oft-quoted passage shows not only his repugnance to democracy, but his preference for a "mixt Aristocratie":

Now if we should change from a mixt Aristocratie to a meere Democratie: first we should have no warrant in scripture for it…. A Democratie is, among most Civill nations, accounted the meanest and worst of all formes of Government … and Historyes doe recorde, that it hath been allwayes of least continuance and fullest of troubles.

Yet if Massachusetts was a mixed aristocracy, it was a broad one. Actual power came from the freemen, and no important official had legal authority except by virtue of election by them. Even though the number of freemen may have been only one in four or five of the adult males by 1670, as Palfrey computes, this was large enough to exclude the colony from the category of aristocracy. If we except the standing council, which existed but three years, there was no formally aristocratic element in the government. Winthrop apparently thought that the extensive power of the magistrates, and the fact that the best men were chosen, provided the element of aristocracy, which was diluted or "mixt" by the limited powers of the deputies. But this was to confuse powers with the source of those powers. The mistake does not, however, invalidate the conclusion that Winthrop himself preferred aristocracy.

In the few months before October, 1630, a few men ruled the colony with no check whatever. Even by 1634 there had been grudgingly admitted into the franchise not more than two hundred freemen. Winthrop's desire to keep the governing class as small as possible is shown by his answer to the freemen who demanded their full rights under the charter. The freemen are too numerous to make or execute laws; they may appoint a committee to revise the laws if summoned by the governor, and to consent to taxation. Winthrop's wish was disregarded, and the freemen came into their full rights shortly after this incident; but we have seen enough to realize that the good governor himself would have been heartily glad to keep government always in the hands of a few trusted men. Between 1636 and 1639 there existed in the colony a standing council, elected for life: Winthrop, Dudley, and Endecott. When it was abolished upon the deputies' protest, the order of repeal was drawn up so that no condemnation of the institution was implied. The whole tone of Winthop's narrative proves that he held the standing council to be a useful and permissible organ, and that he resented the demand for its abrogation.

The evolution of a trading corporation into a commonwealth forced the Massachusetts leaders to allow a considerable number of the people more power than their judgment or desire dictated. They made the best of the situation by binding the people to as narrow limits as they could. Although the colony enjoyed representative government, many of the rights which we should consider essential to liberty were absent. Free speech was denied in principle as well as in fact. "It is licentiousnesse, and not liberty, when a man may speake what he list," wrote Winthrop. When we learn that the statement refers to the case of a man who was punished for censuring the General Court while a member thereof, and during the regular session, we wonder what real value debates in that body could have had. Winthrop castigated Coddington and others who signed a petition in favor of the unfortunate John Wheelwright. The petition seems mild enough now, but all the disclaimers of presumption and disrespect could not save the signers from Winthrop's reproof that—

you invite the body of the people to join with you in your seditious attempt against the Court … against the rule of the Apostle, who requires every soul to be subject to the higher powers, and every Christian man to study to be quiet, and to meddle with his own business.

Furthermore, Winthrop abhorred what we regard as the very essence of a system based on an elected legislature.

Sedition doth properly signifie a going aside to make a party, and is rightly described by the Poet … In magno populo cum sœpe coorta est seditio sœvitque animis, etc…. Tully saith, Seditionem, esse dissensionem omnium inter se, cum eunt alii in aliud, when the people dissent in opinion and go several wayes. Isidore saith, Seditiosus est, qui dissentionem animorum facit et discordias gignit.

Such a definition of sedition rules out any organized political opposition—a thing unknown anywhere, to be sure, in 1637. Further, it makes impossible any concerted effort to unseat those in power. The voter could vote as he pleased, but he must do it respectfully, he must not publicly persuade others to vote as he voted, and he must not criticize those in office.

It is well to remember that free speech, the right of petition, and the right of organized opposition were the fruits, not the precursors of the seventeenth century; and we must not blame Winthrop because he was not in advance of current thought. Nevertheless it must be said that by denying these rights to the people, and by maintaining a close alliance with the ministry, the leaders of Massachusetts Bay were able to set up an aristocracy in fact. These leaders were not unscrupulous men avid of power, but sincere zealots of aristocratic birth and training who honestly believed that it was for the good of the people to keep power in the hands of those best fitted to exercise it.

Winthrop's theory of the proper relation of leaders to people is brought out admirably in his famous definition of liberty.

There is a twofold liberty, natural … and civil or federal. The first is common to man with beasts and other creatures…. This is that great enemy of truth and peace … which all the ordinances of God are bent against…. [Civil liberty] is the proper end and object of authority, and cannot subsist without it; and it is a liberty to that only which is good, just, and honest…. This liberty is maintained and exercised in a way of subjection to authority.

This definition has been widely praised. Lately Mr. Edwin D. Mead has said of it: "If there were anywhere in the English world in the 1630's a nobler definition of liberty true and false than that in Winthrop's 'Little Speech' I do not know where to find it." This is indeed a conception of liberty perfectly familiar to "the English world in the 1630's"; but it is nothing more. Without the aura of Winthrop it would be distasteful to most modern readers. Whether we like the definition or not, it is good to know what precisely we are praising or blaming. For, since the day when Winthrop soothed the ruffled deputies with the charm of his rich Biblical prose, the expansive thought of the eighteenth century has changed many of the world's ideas, and none more than that of liberty. Just what "liberty" does mean in the twentieth century, it would be rash to say. Many would agree with Soame Jenyns, a placeman of 1765, that liberty "is a phrase of so various a signification, having within these few years been used as a synonymous term for blasphemy, bawdy, treason, libels, strong beer, and cyder, that I shall not presume to define its meaning." Broadly speaking, most of us start by thinking of liberty as an uncontrolled right to do anything, and then pare it down to suit the exigencies of society, as we conceive them. When we are through, however, we have a great deal left; and so enduring has been the idea of inalienable natural rights that oldfashioned people are rash enough to believe that we have more left than we have given up. "Liberty" needs no document to justify itself; "authority" (at least in theory) must substantiate every claim to infringe it.

A study of Winthrop's ideas indicates at once the opposite character of his conception. The man in society does not start with rights. He subjects himself to the government of others when he enters the compact, and "liberties" which he possesses thereafter are the result of grant from those in authority. The large, indefinite "right" in the body politic is "authority." There is, properly speaking, no "liberty"; there are only "liberties"—definite privileges, usually enrolled in an imposing document and provable in court. This use of the word "liberty" occurs often in Winthrop's works. It would be strange if we should find any other use of it, for then indeed would Winthrop have been ahead of his times. One might be given the "freedom" of a town, a town might possess the "liberty" of holding a market on Wednesdays, but few, besides some despised sectaries, gave any broader meaning to these terms in the early seventeenth century. In Massachusetts Bay the "liberty" of the freeman was restricted to the election of officers and a share in making laws. The definition of what was "good, just, and honest" was the province of the magistrates, and in some cases of the General Court, to determine. When they rejected free speech, the right of petition, and the right to oppose the government, they were neither ahead of nor behind the English political thought of their era.

Whence came this "authority" which bulked so large in Winthrop's political theory? "It is yourselves," he tells the freemen in his speech, "who have called us to this office, and being called by you, we have our authority from God, in way of an ordinance, such as hath the image of God eminently stamped upon it, the contempt and violation whereof hath been vindicated with examples of divine vengeance." Note this conception of the divine origin of magistracy—of the sacrosanct character of the magistrate. "Iudges are Gods upon earthe," says Winthrop. "Whatsoever sentence the magistrate gives, according to these limittations, [internal only] the judgment is the Lords." Magistrates are the fathers of the commonwealth. To disobey them is to incur not merely the opprobrium of breaking a civil law, but to be guilty of defying the Fifth Commandment.

Does God bestow authority directly, or does he express his will through the voters? The evidence is fragmentary, but Winthrop probably meant that authority comes directly from God, and that the people merely choose the particular person to take office, without by their election conferring a divine right to rule. In the first place, he limits the sacrosanct character of the "powers that be" to the magistrates. If the people voting are the mouthpiece of God, every officer they elect should be considered as deriving his power from God, irrespective of his character or talents. Winthrop does not expressly deny that the deputies do so derive their power, but he comes very near such a denial in several places. He resents the fact that the deputies have been too often sitting as a court of justice; this is a function "to which they have no ordinary callinge … for our Saviour teaches us, that everye man that shall exercise power of Judgment over others, must be able to prove his callinge thereto." Again, "We should incurre Scandall, by undervaluing the gifts of God, and the Ordinance of magistracye, if the Judgment and Authoritye of any one of the Common ranke of the people, should beare equall weight, with that of the wisest and chiefest magistrate…." The context makes it certain that the author included the deputies in the "Common ranke of the people."

The "gifts of God," the ability to prove a "callinge"—these are what give the magistrate his divine authority. Election without those gifts and that calling may give a certain circumscribed power to the deputies. It does not make the judgment of the deputy the judgment of God. This explains Winthrop's willingness to expand the powers of the magistrates by inferences often having no relation to the actual constitution of the colony. It explains his insistence that the powers of all others than the magistrates should be limited as far as possible. It is consistent with his repeated antithesis between "authority" and "liberty"—an antithesis that would have been patently absurd if he had believed that all authority came from the people.

If Winthrop held an exalted theory of the power of the magistrate, he held a no less lofty conception of the magistrate's duty. The magistrates must "square all their proceedings by the rule of Gods word, for the advancement of the gospell and the weale publick"; "In their Administrations, they are to holde forthe the wisdome and mercye of God, as well as his Iustice." "They are to be accountable to him for their miscarriages in the waye and order of this kingdome." If we can not prove that Winthrop read the following passage in the Institutes of Calvin, we can at least say that it is mirrored in many a sentence in his writings:

For what an ardent pursuit of integrity, prudence, clemency, moderation, and innocence ought they to prescribe to themselves, who are conscious of having been constituted ministers of the Divine justice.

The magistrate, then, must answer to God. Must he answer to anyone else? What checks Winthrop was forced to accept from the royal charter and from circumstances, he accepted. The real bounds to the magistrate's power he thought should be self-imposed. He preached the doctrine of non-resistance repeatedly. "It was Luthers Counsell to the Anabaptists … that thoughe their magistrates did oppresse and iniure them, yet they should pray for them, and commend them, and seeke to winne them by gentlenesse." But the magistrate has no arbitrary power. He is limited by certain checks.

The magistrates are members of the churches here, and, by that covenant, are regulated to direct all their wayes by the rule of the gospel, and if they faile in anythinge, they are subject to the churches correction. 2dly. As they are freemen, they are regulated by oath, to direct their aymes to the wellfare of this civill body. 3dly. As they are magistrates, they are sworne to doe right to all, and regulated by their relation to the people, to seeke theire wellfare in all things.

The responsibility to the church amounted to little, as will appear when we come to Winthrop's ideas on church and state. The same assertion is true for the freeman's and the magistrate's oaths. Winthrop is careful to say nothing of what the people may do if these covenants are violated. Where officers are practising that soul-searching induced by Calvinism, constitutional checks conceivably would not have the force of the internal checks favored by Winthrop. We may wish that he had seen that such a system, like monarchy, relies too much on personal character. But he answers us neatly.

What if the magistrates should growe corrupt etc? this is no more to be feared than of the deputies, and if of both, then of all the rest of the people, and if so, then it is past remedye.

To deny absolutely the truth of this reply we should have to forget much of what has happened since Winthrop lived.

One large power which Winthrop gave to the magistrate we have yet to discuss—that of fixing the penalty after conviction of a malefactor. This part of his theory is bound up with his views on the nature of law in general.

If we look for a developed body of thought concerning the fundamental bases of law in Winthrop's works, we shall be disappointed. He is even more scanty here than elsewhere. Busy leaders in a frontier community rarely compose treatises on the most abstruse of all political subjects. The law of nature, or the moral law—"created with and in man"—with God as its author, Winthrop, of course, recognized. Nor are we surprised to find him talking of the law of the Gospel, given to man in a state of regeneracy. But his treatment of these fundamental laws is brief and confused. In addition, Winthrop shared the view common to the Puritans in general, that "Moses his judicials" were valid law in modern societies. He was broader than some of his contemporaries, however, in allowing selection to be made from, and additions to, the Mosaic Code. Although God is the only lawgiver, "he hathe given power and giftes to men to interprett his Laws," Winthrop also had a strong sense of the legal force of custom. He opposed a definite written code for the colony because "such laws would be fittest for us, which should arise pro re nata upon occasions, etc., and so the laws of England and other states grew." It is pleasant to feel this cool breath of rationalism sweeping away momentarily the murk of Biblical citation, but we must not take it too literally. Other passages show that what Winthrop wished was a system of law based on the Mosaic Code, expanded by interpretation. The English common law had a rather different genesis! The fact is, the English lawyer and the devout Puritan clashed in Winthrop's nature, and he alternately speaks the language of each.

Winthrop recognized the validity of positive law, but insisted that it must conform to the law of God.

We have no laws diametrically opposite to those of England, for then they must be contrary to the law of God and of right reason, which the learned in those laws have anciently and still do hold forth as the fundamental basis of their laws, and that if anything hath been otherwise established, it was an errour, and not a law.

We may compare this point of view with that of the "judicious" Hooker, but Winthrop may well have got these ideas from some other source, since they had been frequently expressed during and since medieval times.

The most important of the Governor's ideas on law was concerned with the advisability of fixed penalties. Should the penalty be determined in advance by law, or by the magistrate after conviction. He concludes that except in a few cases, penalties should not be prescribed. To have a fixed penalty is to sentence the offender before trial; to remove all need of wisdom in the judge, and to value the judgment of the magistrate less than that of ordinary jurymen, who are allowed to fix damages in civil cases. It is unjust to punish every man alike for the same offense. Even in England penalties are not fixed except for petty crimes. Most important, God has set few penalties, and we should follow his example.

Some of these reasons we should to-day regard as trivial, some fallacious. But the most significant fact about Winthrop's view is that he and his supporters were decidedly heterodox in their own generation. He was in error in saying that the laws of England had few fixed penalties. The belief that we are laying ourselves open to injustice if we do not have a known atonement for every crime has persisted, through Beccaria and Bentham, right down to our own day. Only in recent years has a school of penology appeared which favors the fitting of the punishment to the individual criminal. We are tempted to see Winthrop thinking in ultramodern fashion on this question, but the analogy should not be pushed too far. His thought was Biblical, rather than rationalistic, idealistic rather than pragmatic, and he was thinking of punishment more than of reformation.

The penalty for crime should rarely be fixed, yet the judgment is not therefore arbitrary. The magistrate acts upon a rule, "which Rule is the Worde of God, and such conclusions and deductions, as are, or shalbe, regularly drawne from thence." So we come again to the one effective check which Winthrop puts upon the magistrate:—his duty, as a Christian called to office by divine authority, to be guided by the divine law. Who shall interpret that law? Is the magistrate subject to the control of those best fitted to expound it—to the control of the elders or the church?

As a matter of fact, the magistrates of Massachusetts Bay were subject to the control of both church and elders. In a society where every act is regarded as a moral debit or credit, every act becomes invested with religious meaning. Winthrop often called upon the church elders for advice upon matters not connected with religion. Charles Bourgeaud stated a more than approximate truth when he said that—

By law the civil government was distinct from the ecclesiastical, but in fact it was strictly subordinate to it. Owing to their moral influence, the pastors and elders formed a sort of Council of Ephors; no important decision was arrived at without their consent.

But it was a settled belief of the Puritans that no elder could hold civil office. When the Boston church asked the churches of Salem and Plymouth their opinion on the question, both answered that no elder could at the same time be a magistrate. Winthrop, in a letter to Thomas Hooker in 1638, reproved the Connecticut people for having allowed the "managing of state business" to fall "upon some one or other of their ministers." Massachusetts, then, was not, in theory, a theocracy.

In practice, however, the advice of the elders was almost always followed. Probably the most extreme view of their power was stated by John Cotton. Winthrop narrates in his Journal that

Mr Cotton preached … he laid down the nature or strength … of the magistracy, ministry, and people, viz.,—the strength of the magistracy to be their authority, of the people, their liberty; and of the ministry, their purity; and showed how all of these had a negative voice, etc.

This pronouncement, we are told, "gave great satisfaction to the company," but we ought not be sure that Winthrop shared in that satisfaction. We find him saying, at one time, that "the cause being of a civil nature, it belonged to the court, and not to the elders, to judge of the merit thereof." On the other hand, he often called upon the elders for their opinion in cases of a purely civil nature, and he was not ashamed to admit that "the ministers have great power with the people, whereby through the good correspondency between the magistrates and them, they are the more easyly governed."

Winthrop and the Massachusetts leaders seem to have made this distinction: the elders could hold no civil office, but as men gifted in the lore which was the great guide of life, they should be consulted upon all important questions. There was nothing new about this theory; it was held by almost all Puritans, both Disciplinarians and Separatists. On the question of the power of the church as a body over the magistrates, however, Winthrop differed from the belief of the earlier English Puritans.

The Puritans of the sixteenth century all agreed that even the highest magistrates were subject to church censure. Both Presbyterians and Separatists took this position. Robert Browne wrote, "who knoweth not, that though magistrates are to keep their civil power above all persons, yet they come under the censures of the Church if they be Christians." Barrow thought that the church "ought to have judgment ready against every transgression, without respect of persons." Thomas Cartwright had said that "civil magistrates must govern … according to the rules of God prescribed in his word, and that as they are nurses, so they be Servants unto the Church."

Winthrop dissented vigorously from these views.

Magistrates as they are church members are accountable to the church for their failings, but that is when they are out of their calling; … If a magistrate shall, in a private way, take away a man's goods or his servants, etc., the church may call him to account for it; but if he doth this in pursuing a course of justice (though the thing be unjust) yet he is not accountable, etc. [The church has other weapons] wisdome, pietye, and meeknesse [to bind rulers] therefore no need to binde them by churche censures.

There is no doubt that Winthrop was here giving voice to the predominant sentiment of the leaders, elders as well as laymen. In 1636 a group of the ministers affirmed as their opinion "that no member of the court ought to be publicly questioned by a church for any speech in the court, without the license of the court."

What power ought the state to have over the church? The early Separatists regarded the two organizations as independent, denied to the civil power the right to establish the church by law or force, but nevertheless held that false and idolatrous forms of worship must be put down by the state. Winthrop and his associates seem to have kept close to this position. Defending the action of the Court in the Wheel-wright case, Winthrop said: As for such as have taken offence, that the cause was not first referred to the Church, we desire them to consider these reasons. 1. This case was not matter of conscience, but of a civill nature, and therefore most proper for this Court to take cognizance of…. 2. In some cases of religious nature, as manifest heresie, notorious blasphemy, etc. the Civill power may proceed, Ecclesia inconculta, and that by the judgment of all the Ministers.

And then he makes the matter yet clearer:

It is objected, that the Magistrates may not appoint a messenger of God, what hee should teach: admit so much, yet hee may limit him what hee may not teach, if hee forbid him to teach heresy or sedition, etc. hee incurres as well a contempt in teaching that which hee was forbidden, as sins in teaching that which is evill.

In theory, at least, this is all consistent with the ideas of Browne and the early Separatists. The civil power may not establish a church, or force any one to join it, but manifest heresy must be rooted out. But the fact departed from the theory. Any variation, however slight, from accepted doctrine was likely to be proved "manifest heresie" by the unfortunate practice of the Puritans in not resting content with what the suspected heretic had expressly said. At least one student, after reading the accounts of the years 1636-1638, has concluded that one who announced even mild dissent from established doctrine was almost certain to be proved a menace to the peace of the colony and a flagrant heretic simply by that dogged questioning and deduction of which the Puritans were so fond.

With one exception, Winthrop held no unusual ideas on the subject of the relation of church to state. Even in his declaration of magisterial immunity from church censure he was backed by the ministers. His theory embraced the idea of close coöperation between church and state, denying formal political power to the church and elders, giving large powers to the state over the church. It was the lingering voice of the doctrine which had remained uncontested before 1550, resisting the rising stream of thought which in the Old World, and lately in the New, had enunciated the theory of toleration and absolute separation of the two powers. It was a voice doomed to be smothered by the fact of religious diversity in the colonies, and the example of the mother nation. But dare we deny that it had great value in fostering a much-needed social unity?

…..

We have now and then mentioned in passing a few sources of Winthrop's political theory. His position in the English social scale, his legal training, his tenure of office in Massachusetts Bay—these are the imponderables behind his thought, impossible to evaluate. The magazine from which he drew his ideas was almost filled by the Bible and Calvinism. These he tapped constantly. They form a root of his theory bulking so large that it might be thought futile to search for further sources.

We have seen Winthrop express a theory of law which may have come from Richard Hooker, and we have noted quotations from two classical authors, Cicero and Virgil. These are among the dozen (or fewer) citations to profane writers in all Winthrop's works. The excerpt from Isidore of Seville may well have been taken at second hand from some other writer; the Etymologies were very popular all through the Middle Ages. A very few of the two-score volumes which Winthrop presented to Harvard College might have furnished arguments or ideas on political questions. Besides the Bible and Calvin's Institutes, the Decrees of the Council of Worms and Gregory's Decretals were on the list. John Davenant's Determinationes Questionum Quarundam Theologicarum is an anti-papal work by a moderate Calvinist divine forced to conformity by Laud. The book listed as "Whittakeri praelectiones disputationes" was doubtless either that author's Disputatio de Sacra Scriptura; Contra Huius Temporis Papistas, Inprimis, Robertum Bellarminum (Canterbury, 1588), or his Prœlectiones in Controversiam de Romano Pontifice (1608); both titles indicate the character of the works. The item listed as "Jacobi Fabrii Opera" probably contained a paraphrase of Aristotle's Politics. To his "Arbitrary Government Described" Winthrop appended a long quotation from Thomas Aquinas, which his editor, Mr. R. C. Winthrop, unfortunately did not see fit to print. The manuscript has only recently been found.

Of the innumerable pamphlets printed in England in the 1640's, Winthrop mentions only William Prynne's Treachery and Disloyalty of Papists, and An Answer to Dr. Ferne asserting that Parliament could after the superstructive, not the fundamental laws of England.

This list includes almost every book of a political nature which Winthrop cited or is known to have possessed. But with a few exceptions he does not cite these books. His political theory is Biblical and Calvinistic, in so far as it is drawn from literary sources.

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The divine origin of the authority of the magistrate; the ability and character required to prove his calling to office; the divine law by which he must square all his acts; the necessity of obeying him unquestioningly; these are the threads that run all through the political theory that we have examined. They form a pattern now bright, now dull, but always appearing either as motif or background in Winthrop's discussion of every phase of political action. These theories were not new. But in Winthrop's lack of novelty lies his importance. During his life, and for many years after, the aristocratic tradition of which he was the most luminous exponent in America dominated the life of Massachusetts. Until the old school was gone, the ultimate democratic effects of the Reformation and the American frontier had to bide their time.

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Economic Ideas of John Winthrop

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