SOURCE: "Seventeenth-Century Nihilism" and "The New England Way," in The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop, edited by Oscar Handlin, Little, Brown and Company, 1958, pp, 134-54, 155-73.

[A respected American historian, Morgan is the author of such studies as The Puritan Family (1944), Birth of the Republic, 1763-89 (1956), and Roger Williams: The Church and State (1967). In the following excerpt, from his monograph on Winthrop, Morgan gives an account of Winthrop's role in the trial of Anne Hutchinson and in the writing of the Body of Liberties document.]

On September 18, 1634, two hundred passengers disembarked at Boston's bustling, cluttered landing place and picked their way through the dirty streets. The squalor of the place was enough to make them quail, but they reminded themselves that it was holy ground, where they might worship God without bishops or kings or Romanizing ritual. Among the arrivals who strengthened their resolution with this thought were William Hutchinson and his wife Anne.

Winthrop described Hutchinson as "a man of a very mild temper and weak parts, and wholly guided by his wife." But a man with a wife like Anne Hutchinson could scarcely not have been guided by her. All we know about Anne Hutchinson was written by other hands than hers, for the most part by writers whose main purpose was to discredit her. Yet the force of her intelligence and character penetrate the libels and leave us angry with the writers and not with their intended victim.

Winthrop, who was one of the libelers, tells us at the outset that she was "a woman of a ready wit and bold spirit." This was an absurd understatement. Though Winthrop, in common with his century, believed that women's minds could not stand the strain of profound theological speculation, Anne Hutchinson excelled him not only in nimbleness of wit but in the ability to extend a theological proposition into all its ramifications. And like so many of the men and women of this time—like Roger Williams, for example—she was ready to trust her mind and to follow in whatever path it might lead her. In 1634 the path had led to Boston.

She was not, by intention at least, a separatist; she had once been tempted in that direction but did not succumb. She had nevertheless determined that she must not attend a church where the minister failed to teach the doctrines of divine grace in their undiluted purity. Until 1633 she had listened to the sermons of the Reverend John Cotton at Boston in Lincolnshire and had known them for true preaching. She had also admired her brother-in-law, the Reverend John Wheelwright. But when Cotton and Wheelwright were silenced by the bishops, "there was none in England," she said, "that I durst heare." After Cotton departed for New England, she persuaded her husband to follow him.

In singling out John Cotton as her spiritual leader, Mrs. Hutchinson showed, by Puritan standards, excellent taste. Cotton had already won a reputation in England before he left, and the Boston church chose him as teacher shortly after his arrival in New England in September, 1633. Here his fame rose steadily. Indeed, his wisdom was so revered that Hugh Peter, who was later to be honored as Cromwell's chaplain, urged that Cotton be commissioned to "go through the Bible, and raise marginal notes upon all the knotty places of the scriptures." Nathaniel Ward, the testy pastor of Ipswich, held himself unworthy to wipe John Cotton's slippers. And Roger Williams observed that many people in Massachusetts "could hardly believe that God would suffer Mr. Cotton to err."

Winthrop himself was one of Cotton's admirers and frequently took occasion to record the minister's opinions with approval. He valued most in Cotton what Mrs. Hutchinson did—the man's evanglical preaching of God's free grace. All New England Puritans believed in this doctrine, which they usually described in terms of a covenant between God and man whereby God drew the soul to salvation. Strictly speaking, there was nothing a man could do to lay hold of this "covenant of grace." If God predestined him to salvation, God would endow him with faith and fulfill the covenant. But the doctrine could be applied in a variety of ways, and the New England ministers had been suggesting the need to "prepare" oneself so as to facilitate the operation of God's saving grace when and if it should come.

Under the spell of this suggestion it was easy to develop notions of the kind that good Puritans always denounced as "Arminian"—whenever they could recognize them. Though preachers always took care to state that human efforts counted for nothing in the scale of eternity, it was easy to draw the opposite (Arminian) conclusion from their insistence on "preparation," easy to slip into Arminian ways of thinking without realizing it. The history of New England theology for a century and a half after the founding is the history of this steady tendency toward Arminianism, punctuated by periodic reassertions of the Calvinist dogma of divine omnipotence and human helplessness.

John Cotton was the first of a long line of preachers—among whom the most eminent was Jonathan Edwards—to make this reassertion. He did not make it in the unequivocal terms that Edwards did, and perhaps for that reason he did not end as Edwards did by being expelled from his church. Instead he pulled his congregation back from their Arminian wanderings and won their gratitude. Winthrop counted himself as one of those whom Cotton had rescued. He noted in January, 1637, that "the Doctrine of free justification lately taught here took me in as drowsy a condition, as I had been in (to my remembrance) these twenty yeares, and brought mee as low (in my owne apprehension) as if the whole work had been to begin anew. But when the voice of peace came I knew it to bee the same that I had been acquainted with before …" Probably most members of the Boston church reacted to Cotton's preaching as Winthrop did. It woke them from their Arminian napping and sharpened their sense of God's free grace, but it did not make them feel in the end that their previous religious experiences had been false.

But the evangelical preaching of divine omnipotence and human helplessness has always produced extravagant results, for these doctrines may too easily be translated into a denial of any connection whatever between this world and the next. Puritanism allowed only a tenuous connection at best; it allowed a man to look at his life here as evidence of his prospects in eternity, but it gave him no opportunity to affect his eternal condition. When John Cotton warned his listeners away from the specious comfort of preparation and re-emphasized the covenant of grace as something in which God acted alone and unassisted, a bold mind might believe that life in this world offered no evidence at all of eternal prospects. And Mrs. Hutchinson was nothing if not bold.

After her arrival in Boston her admission to the church was delayed for a time because one of her fellow passengers had been disturbed by some unorthodox opinions she had expressed on shipboard. But John Cotton evidently recognized her theological talents and her zeal, and within two years she was admitted and won the admiration of a large part of the congregation. It was not uncommon at this time for small groups to hold weekly meetings for religious discussions, in which the sermon of the previous Sunday furnished the starting point. Mrs. Hutchinson, who had gained a wide acquaintance in Boston by serving as a midwife, soon found herself the center of one of these meetings, held in her home. She would explain, to the best of her ability, what her beloved Mr. Cotton had said on Sunday and would then go on to expand some of his doctrines.

In these weekly meetings she carried the principles of divine omnipotence and human helplessness in a dangerous direction, toward the heresy known to theologians as Antinomianism. Since man was utterly helpless, she reasoned, when God acted to save him He placed the Holy Ghost directly within him, so that the man's life was thereafter directed by the Holy Ghost, and the man himself, in a sense, ceased to be. At the same time she concluded that human actions were no clue to the question of whether or not this transformation had taken place. The fact that a man behaved in a "sanctified" manner, breaking none of the laws of God, was no evidence that he was saved. In Puritan terminology this meant that "sanctification" was no evidence of "justification," that men's lives in this world offered no evidence of their prospects in the next. The orthodox Puritans never claimed that the correspondence was perfect: hypocrisy together with the thousand imperfections of human vision could deceive the most skillful examiner. But it was usually possible to recognize sanctification, and that sanctification resulted from justification was not to be doubted at all. Mrs. Hutchinson doubted and denied it. She was, it seemed, an Antinomian.

Winthrop first became alarmed by her teachings in October, 1636, a few months after the departure of Roger Williams. He noted her errors and began a list of the awful conclusions that must ensue from them, but stopped and left a large blank in his journal, over-come perhaps by the train of horrors he saw before him. Before they were through with Mrs. Hutchinson the guardians of New England orthodoxy enumerated nearly a hundred dangerous propositions that could be deduced from her views. It is not possible to tell which propositions she actually endorsed and which were simply attributed to her, but the list is a formidable one, and strikes at the heart of the Puritan experiment.

Mrs. Hutchinson's first principle, "that the person of the Holy Ghost dwells in a justified person," was dangerously close to a belief in immediate personal revelation. It threatened the fundamental conviction on which the Puritans built their state, their churches, and their daily lives, namely that God's will could be discovered only through the Bible. In combination with the belief that sanctification offered no evidence of justification, it undermined the whole basis for moral endeavor which Puritan theologians had constructed since the time of Calvin. What reason for a man to exert himself for the right if he may "stand still and waite for Christ to doe all for him"? What reason for a church of saints, if "no Minister can teach one that is anoynted by the Spirit of Christ, more than hee knowes already unlesse it be in some circumstances"? What reason for a state ruled by the laws of God, if "the Will of God in the Word, or directions thereof, are not the rule whereunto Christians are bound to conforme themselves"?

These views were not necessarily separatist. Rather they were a seventeenth-century version of nihilism. But to make matters worse, Mrs. Hutchinson and her friends developed a new and especially invidious form of separatism, too. Though she denied that sanctification could be evidence of justification, she did maintain that any justified person could discern, presumably at the direction of the Holy Ghost within him, whether or not another person was justified. On the basis of this almighty insight Mrs. Hutchinson and her followers confidently pronounced any person they encountered as "under a covenant of grace" (really saved) or "under a covenant of works" (delluded and damned because relying on good works instead of divine grace), so that "it began to be as common here," Winthrop says, "to distinguish between men, by being under a covenant of grace or a covenant of works, as in other countries between Protestants and Papists." The wholesale destructiveness that might result from Mrs. Hutchinson's self-assurance became apparent when she hinted to her admirers that all the ministers in Massachusetts, with the exception of her two old favorites, John Cotton and John Wheelwright, were under a covenant of works and therefore unfit to preach the gospel.

Winthrop saw trouble ahead when he first took notice of Anne Hutchinson's views in October, 1636. The weekly meetings at her house were steadily swelling, and the people who attended them walked the streets of Boston wearing the expression of devotees. Those rapt faces, Winthrop knew, carried a threat to the colony's commission. But there was no law against religious gatherings, and Mrs. Hutchinson was careful to state her heresies in equivocal language. It would be difficult to prove anything against her.

By the end of October, 1636, her followers felt strong enough to seek an official spokesman for their doctrines in the Boston church. Because Mrs. Hutchinson was a woman, no one would think of proposing her for a church office, but her brother-in-law would do as well. John Wheelwright had arrived in June, with a reputation as an able preacher and with the additional recommendation of having been silenced by the bishops in England. Mrs. Hutchinson, of course, endorsed him, and he endorsed her. At a church meeting on October 30 it was moved that he be made a teacher, though the congregation possessed two other ministers—John Cotton as teacher and John Wilson as pastor. Winthrop grasped the chance to act and immediately opposed the election of a third minister, particularly one "whose spirit they knew not, and one who seemed to dissent in judgment."

As a member of the church, Winthrop had the right to a voice in its affairs, but no more than any other member, and he was up against a growing majority of the Boston church, which included the largest single concentration of freemen in the colony. He was also up against the popular young governor, Henry Vane, who was on his feet at once to say that Wheelwright's doctrines were no different from those of Cotton. Cotton himself neither admitted nor denied the similarity, but obviously was in sympathy with the majority.

More was at stake here than the welfare of the Boston church, and Winthrop, calling on his own reserve of popularity, was able to persuade the meeting not to elect Wheelwright. But the victory cost him many friends, even though he protested that he meant no personal slight to Wheelwright, and "did love that brother's person, and did honor the gifts and graces of God in him." In the weeks that followed, Wheelwright took himself off to the scattered settlement at Mount Wollaston, leaving behind a congregation that grew ever more resentful of Winthrop and his ally, the pastor John Wilson. Wilson, as pastor, had played second fiddle ever since John Cotton had arrived, but Mrs. Hutchinson's infectious contempt reduced his influence in the congregation to the vanishing point. He and Winthrop were left almost alone to console each other.

Winthrop as usual was sure that people would see things his way if they would only listen to reason, and as usual he set down in black and white the reason he hoped they would listen to. Fortunately, before presenting this document to his opponents he sent a copy to his friend Thomas Shepard, the pastor at Cambridge, who saw at once that Winthrop was no theologian. Though Winthrop knew better than his opponents the necessity of living in this world, he was no match for them in speculating about the next. His arguments, if one may judge from Shepard's criticisms (Winthrop's text is lost), were studded with expressions that smacked of Arminianism; "and so," Shepard warned him, "while you are about to convince them of errours, they will proclayme your selfe to hold foorth worse." Winthrop, who was no Arminian, probably destroyed his composition, and Boston remained deluded and defiant.

Though Winthrop could make no headway within his church, the rest of the colony was beginning to take alarm. The members of the Boston faction, like most religious fanatics, were not content to march quietly along their short cut to Heaven. They hoped to entice the rest of the colony along it and thought the best way was to visit other congregations and heckle the ministers. This method did not prove as effective as Mrs. Hutchinson's winning words. The General Court began to take notice of the problem, and Governor Henry Vane found his popularity ebbing outside Boston as rapidly as Winthrop's had inside. In a petulant fit of tears Vane offered to resign, and the General Court obligingly agreed to let him. This so alarmed his Boston adherents, who enjoyed having a champion in the governor's chair, that they coaxed him hard to stay, and he finally allowed himself to be persuaded.

By the beginning of 1637 the colony was divided into two hostile camps, the one centering in Boston, the other spread out around it, each constantly sniping at the other. In January the General Court ordered a fast, so that the people might mourn their dissensions. But empty bellies seldom beget brotherly love, and when John Wheelwright showed up at the afternoon lecture by Cotton, he rose up at its conclusion to launch a momentous sermon of his own against those enemies of the Lord who thought that sanctification was an evidence of justification. These holy-seeming men, he said, must be put aside. They were under a covenant of works, and "the more holy they are, the greater enemies they are to Christ." True believers must hew them down: "we must lay loade upon them, we must kille them with the worde of the Lorde."

Wheelwright was speaking figuratively and not actually proposing a blood bath, but he made it plain that he thought most of the existing ministers and probably most of the magistrates, too, could be dispensed with. Someone took down his words, and at the next meeting of the General Court, in spite of the protests of Vane and a few others, he was convicted of sedition. The sentence was deferred till the following session, which the court appointed to be in Cambridge, away from the immediate source of trouble.

This meeting, held the following May, was the regular time for election of officers. When it assembled, a petition from Boston was presented against the conviction of Wheelwright. Governor Vane wanted to deal with the petition before proceeding to election, but Winthrop and the other magistrates insisted on having the election first. When the votes were cast, it was found that Vane had not only failed of re-election but had been left out of the government altogether. The freemen had finally decided to recall the man who was best qualified to restore the peace. Winthrop was back in the governor's chair with Dudley once again as deputy governor. "There was great danger of a tumult that day," Winthrop noted, "and some laid hands on others," but seeing themselves outnumbered, the Bostonians finally decided that this was not the time to hew down the unholy holy and departed for home.

Winthrop now had the authority to crush the opposition, and it was certainly his inclination to bring the whole unhappy business to as speedy an end as possible. But to suppress or banish so large a segment of the population would be to effect the very separation he wished to avoid. His principal weapon must still be persuasion. Instead of dealing with Wheelwright at once, he again deferred sentence and arranged for a general day of humiliation and for a synod of ministers to be held in the late summer to discuss the points at issue and provide the court with a well-defined statement by which to judge the current heresies. Wheelwright was told that the court was still convinced of his guilt, "but if, upon the conference among the churches, the Lord should discover any further light to them than as yet they had seen, they should gladly embrace it." Nor did Winthrop deal with the opposition for their riotous behavior and insolent speeches on election day. Though there had been ample provocation for an indictment, the court hoped that by refraining from this and by deferring Wheelwright's sentence, "their moderation and desire of reconciliation might appear to all."

The ministers from the beginning had tried to win Cotton away from his heretical admirers, but he held firmly to the top of the fence. He did not endorse Mrs. Hutchinson's consignment of the other ministers to perdition, but he refused to believe that she and Wheelwright held the heresies imputed to them. At the same time he himself disapproved the current doctrine of preparation and maintained that more rigorous views had helped to effectuate a marked awakening of the spirit in Boston.

During the summer months Winthrop's dignity and patience were repeatedly taxed by the sulking saints of that town. Until shamed into it, Boston made no move to provide him with the sergeant halberdiers who customarily accompanied the governor to the first day of General Court and to Sunday meeting. Rather than press the point, he used his own servants and politely declined when at last the town left-handedly offered men but not sergeants. His comings and goings from Boston were also pointedly ignored, in marked contrast to the honor accorded him by other towns, which sent a guard to escort him into and out of their territory. And Henry Vane, until his departure for England on August 3, conducted himself with unabashed schoolboy discourtesy, refusing the invitation to sit in the magistrates' seats at the Boston church, though he had sat there ever since his arrival in the colony, refusing to attend a dinner party at Winthrop's home and instead carrying off the intended guest of honor, a visiting English nobleman, to dine on Noddle's Island with Samuel Maverick.

Although Winthrop set much store by his official dignity, he did not allow himself to be goaded into further recriminations. Once more he put his pen to work, and this time Thomas Shepard found little to criticize beyond the fact that he was too charitable to his opponents. But the charity was calculated. If he could not win over the leaders of the opposition, he might at least draw away their less extravagant followers.

At the same time he did not propose to allow them to increase their numbers by bringing over like-minded friends from England, where the Reverend Roger Brierly of Grindleton Chapel had recently been achieving notoriety by preaching doctrines similar to those of Mrs. Hutchinson. Winthrop feared that the Grindletonians, as Brierly's followers were called, would shortly be gravitating to Massachusetts, and he accordingly sponsored an order of court forbidding anyone to entertain strangers for more than three weeks without permission of the magistrates. This arbitrary restriction of immigration was denounced by Henry Vane as unchristian. Winthrop defended it but enforced it with his usual flexibility by granting the immigrant friends and relatives of Mrs. Hutchinson and Wheelwright four months in which to decide upon a location for settlement outside the colony.

On August 30 the ministers convened in a synod—all those of Massachusetts, including Wheelwright and Cotton, together with a delegation from Connecticut. For twenty-four days they defined to each other the dreadful doctrines that were polluting the air above Boston, and reached a remarkable unanimity. Even John Cotton, faced with a solid phalanx of his colleagues, squeezed his views into line. Wheelwright alone remained aloof. Close to a hundred heretical propositions were meticulously described and condemned, though the synod tactfully declined to attribute them to specific persons. The unanimous opinion of this body of experts must have given pause to many who had flirted with the new ideas, but a hard core of devotees in Boston continued a noisy defiance.

Winthrop could see no further avenue of persuasion and in November decided that it was time for action. Wheelwright was summoned again before the General Court and upon his refusal to give up teaching his heresies was banished. But Winthrop knew that Wheelwright was not the main source of the trouble. When the court had finished with him, they sent for his sister-in-law.

What followed was the least attractive episode in Winthrop's career. Anne Hutchinson was his intellectual superior in everything except political judgment, in everything except the sense of what was possible in this world. In nearly every exchange of words she defeated him, and the other members of the General Court with him. The record of her trial, if it is proper to dignify the procedure with that name, is one of the few documents in which her words have been recorded, and it reveals a proud, brilliant woman put down by men who had judged her in advance. The purpose of the trial was doubtless to make her conviction seem to follow due process of law, but it might have been better for the reputation of her judges if they had simply banished her unheard.

Mrs. Hutchinson confronted them at Cambridge, where magistrates and deputies crowded into the narrow benches of the meetinghouse, the only building of suitable size in the town. The ministers too were on hand, but only as witnesses, for this was a civil court, in which they had no authority. There was no jury, and no apparent procedure. The magistrates (and even some of the deputies) flung questions at the defendant, and exploded in blustering anger when the answers did not suit them. Even Winthrop was unable to maintain his usual poise in the face of Mrs. Hutchinson's clever answers to his loaded questions.

The court was somewhat handicapped, because Mrs. Hutchinson throughout the preceding months had played her hand so cleverly that only minor charges could be framed against her. The court was preparing to deal with all Wheelwright's supporters who had signed the petition in his favor. They would be disfranchised, disarmed, and in some cases banished. But Mrs. Hutchinson had signed nothing and so could be charged only with "countenancing and encouraging" those who did. To this was added the even weaker charge that she held in her home meetings of men and women which were not tolerable or comely in the sight of God or fitting for her sex. Following these was a last and more serious indictment, that she had traduced the faithful ministers of the colony.

The ground of the first charge was that in entertaining seditious persons she broke the Fifth Commandment: she dishonored the governors, who were the fathers of the commonwealth. This was not really a far-fetched interpretation, for the Puritans always justified subordination and subjection to the state on the basis of the Fifth Commandment. But Mrs. Hutchinson's "entertainment" of seditious persons could be considered seditious only by the most tenuous reasoning, and her nimble wit quickly devised a dilemma for the court. "Put the case, Sir," she said to Winthrop, "that I do fear the Lord and my parents, may not I entertain them that fear the Lord because my parents will not give me leave?"

Winthrop was unable to find his way around this logical impasse and took refuge in blind dogmatism: "We do not mean to discourse with those of your sex but only this; you do adhere unto them and do endeavor to set forward this faction and so you do dishonour us."

The court next called upon her to justify the weekly meetings at her house. In answer she quoted two passages of Scripture: Titus II, 3-5, which indicated that the elder women should instruct the younger, and Acts XVIII, 26, wherein Aquila and Priscilla "tooke upon them to instruct Apollo, more perfectly, yet he was a man of good parts, but they being better instructed might teach him."

There followed this interchange:

Court: See how your argument stands, Priscilla with her husband, tooke Apollo home to instruct him privately, therefore Mistris Hutchinson without her husband may teach sixty or eighty.

Hutch: I call them not, but if they come to me, I may instruct them.

Court: Yet you shew us not a rule.

Hutch: I have given you two places of Scripture.

Court: But neither of them will sute your practise.

To this assertion Mrs. Hutchinson returned her most withering sarcasm: "Must I shew my name written therein?"

Mrs. Hutchinson was having the best of the argument, but the members of the court were only antagonized by her wit. As they saw it, she was usurping the position of a minister without the authority that a minister possessed from his election by a congregation. Her meetings were a fountain of dissension and separatism for which the community was liable to punishment by the Lord. On this note the court closed the argument: "We see no rule of God for this, we see not that any should have authority to set up any other exercises besides what authority hath already set up and so what hurt comes of this you will be guilty of and we for suffering you."

The greater part of the audience doubtless breathed a silent "Amen," and the trial moved forward to the final accusation, that she had insulted the ministers. The basis of this charge was a conference held the preceding December between the ministers and Mrs. Hutchinson. In spite of the fact that the conference had been private, and they had encouraged her to speak freely, they did not hesitate now to testify that she had designated them all, with the exception of Cotton and Wheelwright, as laboring under a covenant of works. One minister after another was called forward, and when the court adjourned for the day, the evidence against her on this charge looked overwhelming.

That night she went over some notes taken at the December conference by her most determined opponent, John Wilson. Finding some discrepancy between his notes and the testimony offered in court, she demanded the next morning that the ministers be required to give their evidence under oath. This created a considerable stir, because if the ministers swore to their testimony and it was proved to be wrong, they would be guilty not merely of perjury but of blasphemy, of taking the name of the Lord in vain. After much hemming and hawing by the other ministers John Cotton was called upon for the first time to give his version of the conference. With the tact which had enabled him to retain the favor of both sides he soothed the injured pride of his fellow ministers and then brought his speech to a dramatic close by declaring, "I must say that I did not find her saying they were under a covenant of works, nor that she said they did preach a covenant of works." And though pressed by the other ministers, he stood his ground.

With this testimony the case against Mrs. Hutchinson was about to collapse. The first two specifications against her had been too weakly sustained to warrant more than a serious admonition, and now the revered Mr. Cotton had knocked out the props from under the only remaining charge. The triumph was too much. Hitherto Mrs. Hutchinson had been on guard and had dexterously parried every thrust against her. Had she been content to hold her tongue at this point, her judges might have felt obliged to dismiss her with a censure. But instead she now proceeded to justify herself by a torrent of divine revelations.

Winthrop tried to stop her, but the floodgates were opened—perhaps by hysteria. Suddenly he must have seen where this outpouring might lead and was silent. The minutes raced by as she described how one thing after another had been revealed to her through scriptural passages thrust into her mind by God. To the Puritans this was an acceptable form of revelation. But then, still to the accompaniment of Biblical citations, she came to the revelation that she would come into New England and there be persecuted, but need fear no more than Daniel in the lions' den. "And see!" she cried, "this scripture fulfilled this day in mine eyes, therefore take heed what yee goe about to doe unto me … for I know that for this you goe about to do to me, God will ruine you and your posterity, and this whole State."

Here was the naked challenge. Winthrop and his colleagues believed that the Lord would punish Massachusetts if they did not punish Mrs. Hutchinson. Obviously either she or they were deluded, and they asked her "How shee did know that it was God that did reveale these things to her, and not Satan." With a final scriptural flourish to justify what she was about to do and with confidence in the Lord's deliverance, Mrs. Hutchinson at last threw off the confining authority of the Bible and swept arrogantly on.

Mrs. H: How did Abraham know that it was God that bid him offer his son, being a breach of the sixth commandment?

Court: By an immediate voice.

Mrs. H: So to me by an immediate revelation.

Court: How! an immediate revelation?

Mrs. H: By the voice of his own spirit to my soul.

Here it was at last, an acknowledgment of the heresy so long suspected. The Lord had indeed disclosed who was deluded, but He had left it to the court to strike her down! Winthrop recorded that "the Court and all the rest of the Assembly (except those of her owne party) did observe a speciall providence of God, that … her owne mouth should deliver her into the power of the Court, as guilty of that which all suspected her for, but were not furnished with proofe sufficient to proceed against her…." It required only the briefest deliberation for the court to agree that Mrs. Hutchinson's words were sufficient cause for banishment, and when she said, "I desire to know wherefore I am banished," Winthrop gave the shabby final word: "Say no more, the court knows wherefore and is satisfied."

The sentencing of Anne Hutchinson was followed by the disfranchising and disarming of her closest adherents, who might at any moment receive an immediate revelation directing them to kill her judges. Religious enthusiasm was known to produce such results. Fortunately, the number of unwavering Hutchinson disciples was small. Her heretical declaration at the trial had driven off many in disillusionment. Though badly shaken, the Boston church for a time kept dogged faith that the declaration had been the result of unfair pressure and chicanery by the court. But when they sought to satisfy their doubts at a church meeting, Mrs. Hutchinson offered some testimony so obviously contrary to her own previous statements that they could only reluctantly conclude to abandon her. In March, 1637, they voted to excommunicate her, and at the end of the month, her banishment having been deferred four months because of the winter and her pregnancy, she departed for Rhode Island, followed by the few faithful.

Winthrop's victory at the trial had been an unsavory triumph of arbitrary power, but happily it represented more than the mere crushing of a helpless woman. When she left, Massachusetts lost a brilliant mind, but God's commission was secured. Even the Boston church recovered from the troubles and was restored to unity. Only a little over a year later Winthrop looked back and congratulated himself on not having withdrawn from the church when every hand was turned against him. "By this time," he writes, "there appeared a great change in the church of Boston; for whereas, the year before, they were all (save five or six) so affected to Mr. Wheelright and Mrs. Hutchinson, and those new opinions, as they slighted the present governour and the pastor, looking at them as men under a covenant of works, and as their greatest enemies; but they bearing all patiently, and not withdrawing themselves, (as they were strongly solicited to have done,) but carrying themselves lovingly and helpfully upon all occasions, the Lord brought about the hearts of all the people to love and esteem them more than ever before, and all breaches were made up, and the church was saved from ruin beyond all expectation; which could hardly have been, (in human reason,) if those two had not been guided by the Lord to that moderation."

Thus the final lesson of the Hutchinson affair was the same lesson that Winthrop had been learning all his life, the importance of not separating.

…..

Massachusetts, then, was not going to crumble into a hundred holy little bands, all looking for perfection in this world and finding it in their own exclusive sanctimoniousness. With the successive expulsions of Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, the freemen who had rebuked Winthrop in 1634 demonstrated that their mission in the wilderness was the same as his: to found a society where the perfection of God would find proper recognition among imperfect men. Those who looked for a private heaven on earth might now look in Rhode Island—and much joy to them. Those who cared not for heaven or hell could await damnation in the Old World. Massachusetts, saved from the zealots, would go about the business to which Winthrop had committed it. Here between the Merrimack and the Charles would be a new Israel, where men might worship as God commanded and only as He commanded, where they might obey His laws in peace and be punished when they disobeyed, where they could live in the world as God required but not lose sight of the eternity that lay beyond it.

The freemen had shown their dedication to the goal Winthrop set them, but they still had their own ideas about how to reach it. Though they called for his assistance against Anne Hutchinson, they had no intention of relinquishing the share of power they had won in 1634. There would be four meetings of the General Court every year, making laws to limit the discretion of the magistrates, and the freemen would be represented by their elected deputies. A benevolent despotism, they were convinced, was not the way to carry out God's commission.

Winthrop disagreed, and so did a number of his fellow magistrates. They could not escape the changes made in 1634, but the settlement of that year had left a great many details of the government untouched, and they hoped that in settling those details they might still retain the kind of paternalistic state in which they believed. Even while they fought for the life of their experiment against Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, Winthrop and the freemen wrestled with each other over this problem. It was, of course, the old struggle for power that goes on inside every society, but in Massachusetts the stakes were high. If the people of this colony were to lead the world in establishing the kind of community God demanded, then they could not afford to err. The role of the deputies, of the clergy, of the magistrates, and of the people must be as God would have it; the laws must be His laws; the government must be His government.

The most difficult problem, in Winthrop's view, was that of the deputies. Winthrop had enough political sense to know that they were there to stay, but he could not bring himself to look on them as genuine officers of government. They were, rather, the representatives of the people, and their only role was to keep the government in touch with public opinion. The magistrates, on the other hand, though elected by the same voters, represented not the people but God. Their authority came from Him and not from the men who put them in office.

Winthrop did not want a government entirely free from popular control. In 1630 he had voluntarily abandoned the oligarchy which the charter made possible, and in 1631 he had persuaded the other magistrates to allow popular election of the governor and deputy governor as well as assistants. In 1634 he had been willing to give the people a voice in matters of taxation and land distribution and in the revision of laws they felt unsatisfactory. But he wanted no blurring of the distinction between rulers and ruled. To confound the two would be to make mockery of the authority God gave to rulers. As John Cotton put it, "if the people be governors, who shall be governed?" Moreover, if the purpose of government was to curb human depravity, then it must be set apart from the people and enabled to act upon them with all the majesty of divine sanction. This could never be if the government were run by the people or their deputies, and subject to their every corrupt whim.

The deputies understandably took a higher view of their role and of their competence to fill it than did Winthrop. While he tried to reduce their part in the new government, they did their best to enlarge it. Winthrop began the dispute shortly after his ouster from the governor's chair by claiming for the magistrates (the governor, deputy governor, and assistants) a "negative voice" on all legislation. The freemen wanted laws. Very well, but no law, he said, could be made without the consent of a majority of the magistrates, through all the freemen or their deputies should be for it. The deputies outnumbered the magistrates in the General Court and if allowed to carry measures by a simple majority, they might frustrate the work of the government, that is, of the magistrates, who were the authorized vicegerents of God.

Winthrop assumed that the line between governors and governed ran between the magistrates and the deputies. But he did not rest his case simply on this assumption. The freemen had claimed the charter as the basis of government. To the charter he went, therefore, and came up with the provision that the authority of the General Court was to be exercised by the majority of the members present, "whereof the Governor or Deputie Governor and six of the Assistants, at the least [are] to be seven." This passage, according to Winthrop, was not merely a definition of the quorum necessary to transact business. Rather it was a requirement that every measure have the approval of the governor or deputy governor and six assistants. It meant, in effect, that no law could be valid unless it was accepted by a majority of the magistrates as well as by a majority of the freemen or their deputies.

Since the General Court was the supreme court as well as the supreme legislature of Massachusetts, the negative voice also meant that no final judicial decision could be rendered against the will of the magistrates. That the magistrates should exercise such control seemed desirable to Winthrop for several reasons, foremost of which was that they were admittedly elected as the best qualified men in the colony for wisdom, judgment, ability, and knowledge. It was to the interest of every freeman to choose well, for the magistrates' duties included sitting as judges in the local county courts and in the monthly Court of Assistants where appeals were heard.

The freemen recognized the scarcity of qualified men; they re-elected many of the same magistrates again and again. This lack of men with the education, legal training, and experience necessary to fit them to make judicial decisions—or legislative ones—was a constant concern to Winthrop. In 1634 he had tried to bar the freemen from power in the General Court for just this reason. "For the present," he had told them, "they were not furnished with a sufficient number of men for such a business." They had taken their powers anyhow and transferred them to deputies. But the deputies, as a group, were no better qualified than the freemen. These pious but unlearned men were called upon to act as a supreme judiciary without even taking an oath to judge according to the laws of God and of the land (because they were not regular judges). Through the place they occupied in the General Court they enjoyed a power in judicial matters equal to that of the wisest and most learned magistrates in the land. Only by the negative voice could the magistrates prevent them from committing the grossest errors.

Winthrop was not able to get the negative voice accepted without opposition, even though it would guarantee an equal power of veto to the deputies. But the matter was so important to him that he supported it with a vehemence he seldom displayed. When Israel Stoughton, a substantial and straightforward freeman from Dorchester, drew up a list of arguments against it, Winthrop rode him down as "a troubler of Israel" and demanded that the General Court burn his arguments and disbar him from office for three years. Winthrop still had enough prestige to carry this point, but in his vindictiveness against Stoughton he overreached himself. Stoughton, who was an honest and able man, admitted privately that Winthrop was "a man of men," but added wisely, "He is but a man: and some say they have idolized him, and do now confesse their error."

This was in 1635, when the election again left Winthrop out of the governorship. But the troubles with Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson were now approaching, and many freemen were ready to give the magistrates a stronger hand to deal with separatism. In 1636, after Williams had departed, the General Court confirmed the negative voice by a statute declaring "that noe lawe, order, or sentence shall passe as an act of the Court, without the consent of the greater parte of the magistrates on the one parte, and the greater number of the deputyes on the other parte."

This was not the end of the question. Whenever the magistrates exercised their veto, there was apt to be argument about it, but they clung to their position and in 1644 secured it by a formal division of the General Court into two houses.

Meanwhile Winthrop and those who agreed with him on the desirability of a strong magistracy took advantage of the uproar caused by the Williams episode to inaugurate another device for stabilizing their authority. The meeting of the General Court in March, 1636, made provision for the election, as occasion might demand, of "a certaine number of magistrates for the tearme of their lyves, as a standing counsaile, not to be removed but upon due conviction of crime, insufficiency, or for some other waightie cause; the Governor for the tyme being to be always president of this counsaile." It was intended that the council should be drawn principally from ex-governors, and accordingly Winthrop and Dudley were selected as the first members. The following month they were empowered to run the colony in the intervals between meetings of the General Court. This they proceeded to do with a very free hand, for the definition of the council's powers had been left comfortably vague and ambiguous.

Thus the government of Massachusetts still had some of the character Winthrop desired for it when he took office again as governor in 1637. After he succeeded in driving Anne Hutchinson and her followers to Rhode Island, a grateful country was content for some time to let him manage affairs in his own way, and the General Court rewarded his services with generous grants of land in the new plantation then beginning at Concord. Friends wrote from England, too, congratulating him on his great success in vanquishing the dangerous opinions which had troubled the colony, and Englishmen demonstrated their confidence by coming over in such numbers as had never been seen before, three thousand in the summer of 1638 alone. God manifested His approval in other ways, too. In the spring of 1637, while Winthrop was in the process of subduing Mrs. Hutchinson, the colony became involved in war with the Pequot Indians. Through the timely warnings of Roger Williams, who was corresponding regularly with Winthrop, and with the assistance of the settlers in Connecticut, who bore the brunt of the fighting, the Pequots were destroyed, virtually the whole tribe killed or captured.

The abundant evidence of divine favor served to confirm Winthrop in his commitment to a government with wide discretionary powers, dedicated to the enforcement of the laws of God, but not accountable to anyone but God. Whenever his actions as governor were questioned, he would carefully explain why he had done what he did, and might even modify his decisions to meet criticisms, but he never failed to rebuke the questioners. The freemen were for the moment so pleased with his combination of firmness and flexibility that in 1638 and again in 1639 they re-elected him in spite of an intention expressed in 1635 to have the office rotate.

But the forces which produced the revolution of 1634 were not extinct. Thomas Dudley still insisted on rigor; and among the freemen new leaders were arising to challenge Winthrop's paternalism. Israel Stoughton, as soon as his three-year disqualification expired, was elected an assistant. With him stood Richard Bellingham, one of the original members of the Bay Company, and Richard Saltonstall, the son of an original member.

Bellingham had been a lawyer in England and a member of Charles I's Parliament of 1628. After his arrival in Massachusetts in 1634 he served for a year in the General Court as deputy for Boston and then was made an assistant and treasurer of the colony. He was a mercurial individual, melancholic and impetuous, not Winthrop's idea of a proper magistrate at all. Bellingham had equal misgivings about Winthrop's high notions of governmental authority and, perhaps from his experience in Parliament, had gained high notions of his own about the authority of the people. He and Saltonstall, who was elevated to the magistracy in 1637, generally deserted their colleagues for the side of the deputies whenever there was a dispute.

In spite of these defections, Winthrop might have been able to continue the high-toned government he thought best if he had not met with opposition from another quarter—the clergy. Although no clergyman ever held civil office in seventeenth-century Massachusetts, clerical influence was conspicuous on more than one occasion in reducing the authority of the magistrates and magnifying the liberties of the freemen.

The relationship between church and state was one of the things that the Puritans knew they must get right. They were certain that God had prescribed the terms of it, and they had thought much about it before leaving England, where church and state were confounded at every level from parish to Crown. In Massachusetts the Puritans drew a firmer dividing line between the two than existed anywhere in Europe. The state was still responsible for supporting and protecting the church: as guardian of the divine commission the state must punish heresy like any other sin. And it did so, inflicting loss of civil and political rights as well as other penalties. But in prosecuting heresy it did not operate as the agent of the churches. It formed its own judgments with the aid of a jury or in the General Court, where the respresentatives of the people sat in judgment with the magistrates. The church had no authority in the government and the government was particularly careful not to allow the actions of any church to affect civil and political rights. In England excommunication carried heavy civil disabilities, in Massachusetts none. The right to vote and hold office was not revoked by loss of church membership.

Though the clergy had no political authority of any kind, they did enjoy a very powerful indirect influence. They were highly respected by their congregations, and when unpopular measures had to be adopted, the magistrates counted on their assistance in reconciling people to the necessity of obedience. When a difficult decision had to be made, the magistrates frequently consulted the ministers, who were learned men and wise in the laws of God. In this way, though they were barred from the exercise of authority, a back door was left open through which they could influence state policy.

Normally the magistrates accepted the advice of the clergy, but the magistrates were big enough men in their own right to maintain their independence—as long as the government remained entirely in their hands. The admission of the deputies to the government magnified clerical influence. Thereafter, whenever the deputies and the magistrates were at odds on any question, both sides were tempted to seek the support of the ministers, whose influence on their congregations might swing the balance of power. Had they been ambitious for temporal authority and had their beliefs not forbidden it, the clergy might have won a regular position in the government. They did not attempt to do so; but when they were consulted in disputes between deputies and magistrates, they did not hesitate to throw their weight on one side or the other.

Although for the most part they supported the magistrates, they agreed with the deputies on the need for specific legislation to reduce discretionary authority. Even John Cotton, one of the most consistent supporters of stability in government, one of the most outspoken enemies of "mere democracy," argued that the prerogatives of authority must be clearly limited. "They will be like a Tempest," he said, "if they be not limited: a Prince himselfe cannot tell where hee will confine himselfe, nor can the people tell: But if he have liberty to speak great things, then he will make and unmake, say and unsay, and undertake such things as are neither for his owne honour, nor for the safety of the State. It is therefore fit for every man to be studious of the bounds which the Lord hath set."

With the ministers preaching the limitation of authority and Winthrop insisting on the opposite, the freemen began once more to grow concerned. Everyone admitted that Winthrop was a great man and an excellent governor, but his pre-eminence made his views seem the more dangerous. Every year brought more Englishmen to Massachusetts, men who had suffered from the discretion of an absolute ruler. In spite of Winthrop's benevolence and wisdom, they felt uneasy for the future.

The ministers continued to worry the subject, and before the election of 1639, some of them tried to persuade the freemen that it was dangerous to keep on reelecting Winthrop to the governorship. Their arguments proceeded, Winthrop wrote, "not out of any dislike of him, (for they all loved and esteemed him,) but out of their fear lest it might make way for having a governour for life, which some had propounded as most agreeable to God's institution and the practice of all well ordered states." Those ministers most sensitive to the dangers of unlimited authority evidently detected that Winthrop himself would not have been averse to a life term. Such was his popularity that they could not prevent his re-election, but they argued the matter so heatedly that many freemen received the impression there was a plot afoot to install a governor for life. As a result, the deputies at the next meeting of the General Court took steps to clip the wings of the Council for Life, established three years before. In their capacity as councilmen Winthrop and his colleagues had been exercising powers that (according to the deputies) they were entitled to exercise only when they sat as magistrates in the General or Assistants Court. Though the General Court did not abolish the council, they did confine its jurisdiction to a few specifically stated functions: military affairs, the Indian trade, and the customs service.

Winthrop accepted this decision with obvious reluctance, thereby perhaps confirming the fears of the deputies and the clergy that he wanted too much power. Before the next election the ministers busied themselves again to effect his ouster, "fearing lest the long continuance of one man in the place should bring it to be for life, and, in time, hereditary." It took some doing to persuade the people to elect anyone else. "Many of the elders," Winthrop noted, "labored much in it," though without any hard feeling toward him. Meeting in Boston in order to concert their efforts, "they sent some of their company to acquaint the old governour with their desire, and the reasons moving them, clearing themselves of all dislike of his government, and seriously professing their sincere affections and respect toward him." He thanked them, assured them that he understood their motives, and expressed "his unfeigned desire of more freedom that he might a little intend his private occasions"; but he doubtless made plain that he would not refuse if the people chose to call him once again—God intended men to use the talents He gave them.

The man whom the elders had selected as the most likely candidate to beat Winthrop was his old friend and antagonist, Thomas Dudley. By a narrow margin Dudley was elected, and in the following year, 1641, through equally strenuous efforts, Richard Bellingham was chosen by a majority of six votes over Winthrop.

With Winthrop out of the way for two years, the deputies were able to press forward with the project which they had pursued ever since their admission to the government. At their first meeting in the General Court in 1634 they had secured the passage of one or two general laws; and at ensuing sessions they kept adding more. They wanted as soon as possible a full and explicit body of legislation to restrain the magistrates and to guarantee civil rights and liberties, but they recognized that laws must be carefully drawn, especially in Massachusetts, where every clause must conform to the word of God. As early as 1635 they saw that their own piecemeal efforts would never provide them with an adequate code, and appointed a committee to frame a complete body of laws "in resemblance to a Magna Charta."

The committee, consisting of John Haynes, Richard Bellingham, Thomas Dudley, and Winthrop, never brought in a report. Winthrop was against the whole idea and quarreled with the other members over the question of leniency. The next year the deputies tried again with a mixed committee of magistrates and ministers. This one did produce a code, the work of John Cotton, but the details of it were not altogether pleasing to the deputies. Though Cotton believed in explicit legislation to limit authority, he had as high notions as Winthrop about keeping government stable. He had argued in 1634 for the reelection of Winthrop, and he went a step further in his code by providing that all assistants be elected for life terms. Though the deputies had agreed to establish the Council for Life, this wholesale creation of life tenures was too much for them. Cotton's code was "taken into further consideration" and quietly put on the shelf.

In 1638, after Winthrop had been back as governor for a year, the deputies resumed their efforts. Gradually things began to move, but as slowly as Winthrop could make them, and when Dudley took over again in 1640, no code had been established. Winthrop explained candidly in his journal why he and some of the other magistrates were dragging their feet. It was not, he said, that they wanted no laws at all, but that they wanted the laws to arise out of judicial decisions rather than out of wholesale legislative enactments. Massachusetts was a new country and a new kind of society, dedicated as no other society had been to carrying out God's covenant. Though the terms of that covenant were set down clearly in the Bible, they could not be applied exactly as they had been in Israel. To agree in advance on positive applications would impose an impossible rigidity. God's will would be defeated in the very attempt to carry it out. Much better to leave the magistrates a free hand. Let them search the Scriptures for the proper rule in each case as it arose. The decisions would be recorded, and when a similar case arose in the future, the judges could hark back to it and be guided by it. Through just such precedents the common law of England had arisen. And did not every good Englishman acknowledge that the common law was more binding, more in accordance with God's will, than the statutes enacted by Parliament?

There was another reason, too, why Winthrop disliked legislation: the Massachusetts charter forbade legislation contrary to the laws of England, and the right legislation would have to depart from English law at many points. There was, however, no express limitation on judicial or executive action, and these might escape notice. For example, if Massachusetts simply followed the practice of having civil magistrates perform the marriage ceremony (as the Scriptures, to Puritan eyes, demanded), no one in England need be the wiser. But to pass a law forbidding any but magistrates to perform it would be to invite interference from England, and might lead to revocation of the charter.

Winthrop's arguments were not unreasonable, but they were no answer to the deputies. He spoke of making laws by judicial precedents, but that was exactly what they feared: how could they be sure the precedents would be the right ones? Precedents accumulating slowly, almost surreptitiously, not exposed to public deliberation might be chains to bind the people in slavery. Government existed to control human corruption; but governors were human, and there must be some way of controlling their corruption, too. A code, therefore, the deputies would have, and they finally found the right man to draw it up—Nathaniel Ward of Ipswich.

Ipswich, the second largest settlement in the colony, attracted men of character (including Winthrop's eldest son, John). Nathaniel Ward, like many Puritans and especially those of Ipswich, was an outspoken man. He was older than Winthrop and had behind him ten years of legal training and practice in London, ten years on the Continent, and ten years as rector of Stondon-Massey in Essex. He came to Ipswich at the age of fifty-five in 1634, served as pastor for a couple of years, and then resigned because of ill health but stayed on in the town.

He was no democrat and no demagogue. Before he died he returned to England and dared stand before the House of Commons and denounce it for its treatment of the King. "I see the spirits of people runne high," he observed disapprovingly to Winthrop in 1639, "and what they gett they hould." But the deputies did well in selecting him to draw their code. His legal experience was more extensive than Winthrop's and had probably been gained in the common-law courts, where lawyers learned to match laws against the discretion of the King, and where the people of England were gradually accumulating a heritage of civil liberties. Ward disapproved of giving the people a free hand in the government, but he was clear that "they may not be denyed their proper and lawfull liberties."

These liberties, along with the liberties of magistrates, churches, animals, servants, children, and women, he sought to protect in the Body of Liberties, as the code he drafted came to be called. There were a hundred provisions, many of which would have been welcomed by most men in old England, whether Puritan or not—for example, number nine: that "no monopolies shall be granted or allowed amongst us, but of such new Inventions that are profitable to the Countrie, and that for a short time"; or number ten, forbidding feudal restrictions on land: "All our lands and heritages shall be free from all fines and licences upon Alienations, and from all hariotts, wardships, Liveries, Primerseisins, yeare day and wast, Escheates, and forfeitures, upon the deaths of parents or Ancestors, be they naturall, casuall or Juditiall." There would be no Court of Wards and Liveries in Massachusetts. Ward introduced other innovations, too, based on his legal experience, to make Massachusetts judicial procedures simpler than English ones. And he guarded the traditional liberties for which Englishmen were even then struggling in the mother country: trial by jury and due process of law.

But the code was not merely a bill of rights to protect the inhabitants of Massachusetts from arbitrary government. It was a blueprint of the whole Puritan experiment, an attempt to spell out the dimensions of the New England way. Trial by jury was part of that way (although the General Court, exercising supreme jurisdiction, operated without a jury) and so was freehold tenure of lands, but only because these practices seemed in accord with the laws of God; for the New England way must be the way God wanted his kingdom on earth to be run, and every law must be measured by His holy word. "No custom or prescription," said the Body of Liberties, "shall ever prevaile amongst us in any morall cause, our meaning is [that no custom or prescription shall] maintaine anythinge that can be proved to bee morallie sinfull by the word of God." And it enumerated all those crimes which the laws of God branded as deserving death: idolatry, witchcraft, blasphemy, murder, bestiality, sodomy, adultery, manstealing, false witness, and treason. The list included several crimes which were more lightly punished in England, but the very brevity showed that God demanded lesser punishments for most offenses than the King of England did. In England the number of capital crimes amounted to about fifty during the seventeenth century and rose to well over a hundred in the eighteenth.

The Body of Liberties did not describe in detail the machinery of government that had been worked out for God's kingdom in Massachusetts during the preceding ten years. It did not, for example, define the relative authority of deputies and magistrates, which was still a matter of dispute. But it did lay down some general principles of fundamental importance: it reaffirmed the decision of 1634 in a provision stating the right of each town to choose deputies for the General Court; it guaranteed the right of freemen to elect all officers of government annually; and it defined the relationship of church and state in unmistakable terms. The state could establish Christ's religion in every church, and it could "deale with any Church member in a way of Civill Justice, notwithstanding any Church relation, office or interest." The church, or rather any particular church, could "deale with any magestrate, Deputie of Court or other officer what soe ever that is a member in a church way in case of apparent and just offence given in their places, so it be done with due observance and respect," but "no church censure shall degrad or depose any man from any Civill dignitie, office, or Authoritie he shall have in the Commonwealth." In other words, a church might censure or excommunicate a magistrate (who happened to be a member) for some improper magisterial action, but the excommunication would not affect his authority or the validity of what he did.

The code also stated some of the principles governing the special institution that the people of Massachusetts had developed to replace the parishes and boroughs and manors from which they had come. In these institutions of English local government, church and state were hopelessly entwined. In order to separate them and also do away with archaic forms of land tenure, it was necessary to construct an altogether new kind of unit, a unit which would be a parish without church officers, a borough without aldermen, a manor without a lord. The New England town was not built after any pre-existing pattern, nor were all towns alike. But in the course of a decade towns had somehow come into being, and some common features had emerged to which the Body of Liberties gave the sanction of law: the freemen of every town should have power to make bylaws (not contrary to the laws of the colony) and could also "choose yearly or for lesse time out of themselves a convenient number of fitt men to order the planting or prudentiall occasions of that Town." These "select persons" should not exceed nine in number and were to do nothing contrary to written instructions given them by their constituents. A unique form of local government had been created.

After much discussion and revision the code of liberties was finally accepted by the General Court in December, 1641. Winthrop recorded the fact in his journal without comment. He would doubtless have been happier if its provisions had been left unexpressed, but he probably found little to quarrel with in the substance of them. They defined the New England way for all to see, and if this might bring trouble, it might also prompt the world to imitation.

The freemen, in any case, were pleased to have things written out. There was still, of course, a great deal left undecided. Nothing, for example, had been said about the education of children, and in the following year the General Court made it a law that all parents see that their children be taught to read. A later enactment provided for free public schools. Many more laws would be needed in the coming years; but with the Body of Liberties established, the freemen felt safe in summoning Winthrop back as their leader. In May, 1642, they returned him to the governorship and kept him there, in spite of occasional protests by clergymen, for most of the remainder of his life.

Meanwhile, during the time Nathaniel Ward was constructing the Massachusetts Magna Charta, things began to happen in the rest of the world that would alter the significance of everything Winthrop and his colony had done or could ever do.