USA > Connecticut > Tercentenary pamphlet series, v. 3 The Beginnings of Roman Catholicism in Connecticut > Part 17
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old and new England must have been frequently dis- cussed between them, and when Peter left on his mission Davenport remained as his substitute. Still pursued by the demands of his opponents that he be dismissed, he became convinced that even Holland was no place for him, and in order to escape an inquiry into his religious views by Sir William Boswell, the English resident there, he returned to England in April, 1636, a year and a half after his departure therefrom.
While in Holland Davenport undoubtedly reached a decision as to his future movements. He determined to follow Cotton and Hooker, there to find freedom from the "extremities" of Laud in England and of Sir William Boswell in Holland. Concealing himself from the authori- ties in the disguise of a country gentleman, he set about gathering a group of his former parishioners and others who were willing to accompany him to New England, and found his chief ally in his former schoolmate and parishioner, Theophilus Eaton. Eaton had been involved in the quo warranto proceedings against the Massachu- setts Bay Company, being one of the ten members of the company that appeared before the Privy Council and disclaimed the charter in 1635, and he was one of those who had been placed in charge of the joint-stock of the company on the departure of the main body to New England. Davenport was aided by others also: the Rev. Samuel Eaton, brother of Theophilus; Edward Hopkins, Theophilus' son-in-law and one of the Warwick grantees; David and Thomas Yale, sons of Mrs. Eaton; John Evance, and a few not clearly identifiable as Londoners. In addi- tion there were groups of families from Kent and Here- ford, the former from the strongly Puritan towns of Egerton and Ashford, the latter under the leadership of the Rev. Peter Prudden, destined after a few years to
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lay the foundations of the town of Milford. We have no knowledge of the circumstances under which these out- side peoples joined the London group.
The vessel that bore the company to America was the Hector-Ferne, master-a boat of about two hundred and fifty tons burden, which had already been once to Boston, where the mate, Miller, had been committed to jail for "certain seditious and opprobious speeches" regarding the failure of the colony to display the king's colors at the fort in the harbor. The St. Stephen's group probably hired the vessel, on its return in 1636, evidently con- tracting for the passage money with the men of Kent and Hereford and a few separate passengers, of whom the only one named was Lord Ley, a young man nineteen years old, the only son and heir of the second earl of Marlborough, who went to see the country. Delayed for a time by the government's impressment of the vessel, the passengers, some two hundred and fifty in number, in- cluding many servants, finally got away in late April or early May and reached Boston on June 26. There Daven- port found himself among old friends, for though Hooker had already gone to Connecticut, Peter and Cotton were at hand to welcome him, and he took up his residence at Cotton's house. How the others were disposed of we do not know. Lord Ley stopped at the common inn; the others probably found lodging and employment where they could, all awaiting the eventual decision as to their future course. That they were expected to constitute a plantation in Massachusetts, as other similar groups had done, is evidenced from the tax twice levied upon Eaton by the general court, the amount in the first instance being what he could pay and in the second £20.
There can be little doubt that the leaders fully in- tended to remain in Massachusetts, for they spent the
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summer and autumn considering the opportunities that the situation offered and the locations that were placed at their disposal. The general court bade them select any site that appealed to them. The Charlestown people in- vited them to make their home there. Those of Newbury, who had already decided to leave their homes and cross the river to Winnacunnet (Hampton, New Hampshire) where the land was more fertile, offered them the tract upon which they were then settled. Plymouth too made them offers. But they would have none of these. Eaton and others among them were merchants, who had their minds set on a place for trade and they could find no harbor along the coast that was not already occupied. The water frontage was overcrowded and the interior, involving a laborious clearing of the forest, did not at- tract them. Other reasons weighed heavily in the balance. The company had reached Boston at a critical time when the excitement over the Antinomian controversy was at its height and when the struggle between Winthrop and Vane was involving the colony in one of its most troublesome domestic conflicts. Also the news from Eng- land threatening the loss of the charter was very disturb- ing, and they were still fearful that a governor general might be imposed upon them. Davenport played his part in the trial of Anne Hutchinson and probably brought about the conversion of Cotton to orthodoxy just as formerly in England Cotton had helped to convert him to non-conformity, but he could have had little desire to enter into competition for place among the clergy or to help in unraveling the tangle of theological opinion in which the colony had become involved. Prudden and Samuel Eaton were ministers also and were probably similarly influenced. However much God's providence may have designed Massachusetts for those who were
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already there, Davenport and Theophilus Eaton were willing to believe that the same "wise God whose pre- rogative it is to determine the bounds of our habitations" had other designs for them. Another country, as yet unoccupied, might well come within the scope of the divine plan. Hugh Peter who had been with Fenwick at Saybrook may well have told Davenport what he saw and heard there. Israel Stoughton had accompanied Mason, Ludlow, and Seely in pursuit of the Pequots as far as the Quinnipiac in July, 1637, and had written favorably of the region, recommending its settlement. Richard Davenport, a lieutenant in the Pequot War, had likewise given glowing accounts. Consequently on August 30, only a little more than two months after their arrival, Theophilus Eaton and others of the company set out for Quinnipiac, their minds fully intent on leaving Boston and finding a place for a plantation on the shores of Long Island Sound. It had taken them but a short time to dis- cover that the Massachusetts Bay colony was no suitable place for the carrying out of the purposes which they had in view.
Eaton returned from Quinnipiac to Massachusetts in the autumn, leaving seven of his companions to occupy the ground which they had selected as the site of their future settlement. These men remained through the winter, losing one of their number by death. They prob- ably kept in touch with their associates in Boston, dis- patching reports and receiving instructions, for it is hardly credible that they should have been left there without occasional communication and the receiving of provisions. The larger body continued to live in Massa- chusetts until the unfavorable season had passed and the weather had become propitious for migration. Davenport continued his activities, preaching sermons, engaging in
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theological discussions, and endeavoring by one means or another to induce others than those who had come in the Hector to join in the new venture. He almost persuaded Vane and Cotton to go with him, but the former decided to return to England and the latter, hesitating because he thought that his influence in Massachusetts had been impaired by his sympathy with the Hutchinsonian party, finally cast in his lot with Massachusetts. Davenport, however, succeeded in adding to his number Captain Nathaniel Turner of Lynn and Captain George Lamber- ton of the Ezekiel Rogers group. The latter company under the leadership of Rogers, the friend of Hooker while living with the Barringtons in Essex, had crossed the water in another vessel. Some of its members went to New Haven, but a majority remained with Rogers and founded Rowley in Massachusetts. Turner and Lamber- ton were destined to play exceedingly prominent parts in the later history of the New Haven colony.
On March 30, 1638, the reorganized company, differ- ing in some important particulars from the body that crossed in the Hector, set sail from Boston, rounded Cape Cod, coursed along the southern New England coast, past the fort at Saybrook, and on to the capacious har- bor, larger than it is today, into which flows the Quinni- piac River. There they found the six men who had survived the winter and who may have done something in the way of gathering materials and erecting structures against their arrival. But the preparations could not have amounted to much, for Michael Wigglesworth, who with others came the next October, reports in his autobiog- raphy that during the following winter his family "dwelt in a cellar partly underground covered with earth," which proved so unsatisfactory a protection that, as he says further, "one great rain broke in upon us and
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drencht me so in my bed being asleep [he was seven years old at the time] that I fell sick upon it." Others had similar uncomfortable experiences. Pits dug in the ground, six or seven feet deep, encased with timber, with plank floors and roofed over were not unknown elsewhere, and these "sellars" may have been something of that sort. A few of them were probably fairly substantial buildings, for we read of them as still occupied in 1642. But as the numbers of the settlers increased, with the arrival of newcomers from Boston and elsewhere, who continued their wanderings until the tide of emigration from England began to ebb, the settlers laid out the town, apportioned home lots, distributed the adjoining fields and meadows, planted crops, and built houses and barns. The town plot was a rectangle, divided into nine squares, of which the square in the center, larger than the others, was set apart as a green or market place. The plot was cut by ways or paths that ran north and south, east and west. Progress was rapid and the cellars and shacks must soon have been supplanted by houses of a more substantial character. The settlement soon fell into the ordinary ways of a plantation.
The Davenport company came to Quinnipiac without royal patent or any certain legal warrant authorizing them to occupy a part of the king's domain. Even if they had reached some understanding with Peter or Fenwick, acting on behalf of the Warwick grantees, whereby they received permission to locate on a part of the Warwick grant, such understanding could have had no legal significance. They bought this land of the In- dians, as a group of purchasers or proprietors, and in several successive transactions extending over a series of years gradually enlarged the area of their possessions; and afterward they made a number of efforts to rectify the
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situation by obtaining a legal warrant for their claims. In 1644 Theophilus Eaton asked Massachusetts for a copy of her charter, thinking to use it to justify the colony's right to settle on the Delaware but when the general court of the jurisdiction realized the uselessness of the document for this purpose, it set about obtaining a royal patent of its own. It instructed Thomas Gregson, one of the most influential and wealthy merchants in the colony, to go to England, and agreed to furnish him with {200 to meet all charges. As Roger Williams had just received from the Warwick committee of the Long Par- liament his patent for Rhode Island it seemed a propi- tious time for New Haven to do likewise. Gregson was advised to join with Connecticut to procure a joint patent for the two colonies. But the effort came to nothing. Gregson was lost in the "phantom ship" and Connecticut deferred action until 1645 when she asked Fenwick to ob- tain an enlargement of the Warwick grant in the form of a royal confirmation, but said nothing about a joint patent to include New Haven. Fenwick, as we know, did not make the attempt, probably realizing that he had no sufficient warrant for the application, as neither he nor anyone else could show the crown lawyers or the parlia- mentary committee any copy of an original Warwick patent. This fact is significant inasmuch as Warwick himself was the head of the parliamentary commission on plantations before whom such application would have to be made. Seven years later New Haven asked Edward Winslow to petition the Council of State for a patent covering the Delaware region, encouraged perhaps by Coddington's successful effort the April before to obtain a commission as governor of Aquidneck. The petition was referred to the Council of Trade of which Sir Harry Vane was the president and then to the committee for
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foreign affairs, but nothing came of it. After the Restora- tion a further attempt was made and it was generally believed in New Haven that Winthrop in his mission of 166I was to ask for a joint patent, but, as will be noted later, Connecticut had no intention of instructing Win- throp to do so. This want of a patent of any kind was a source of great weakness to the New Haven jurisdiction and gave excuse to the Dutch for calling it "a pretended colony."
Thus the settlers of New Haven, like the Pilgrims of Plymouth, were obliged to erect their civil government upon the uncertain foundation of a title obtained from Indian purchases. Both Davenport and Eaton had their own ideas of what such a civil government should be, for both had lived long enough in Massachusetts Bay to study the working of the system there. Davenport had lived for nine months in the same house with John Cotton and must not only have talked with Cotton about his plans but have got from him certain notions also as to the best form of government to erect. It is quite likely that he took advantage of the opportunity to study the contents of the code "Moses his Judicials," which Cotton had drawn up at the request of the general court in 1636 and presented to that body the October following. We know that a copy of that code was sent by Winthrop to New Haven, probably before 1643. This code was not based upon the Bible, despite its marginal references to the Scriptures, which were added after the code was written, but was, in brief form, an outline of the government and law of the Massachusetts Bay colony, based on the charter, the common law of England, and, in capital cases, the Mosaic code. New Haven as a plantation or town, and even more as a jurisdiction or colony after 1643, followed contemporary models in all its essential
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parts, for no system founded on the Old Testament could possibly have proved adequate to meet the needs of a political community in the seventeenth century.
It is very probable that Davenport, Eaton, and others among the leading men of the company had reached some understanding, even before the arrival at Quinnipiac, as to what should be the main features of the political and ecclesiastical edifices they proposed to build. But it was not for a year after they set foot on New Haven soil that they took definite action. Finally, in June, 1639, all the free planters, some seventy in number, gathered accord- ing to tradition in a large barn (built by the leading carpenter of the colony, William Andrews, and belonging to Francis Newman) and there began the dual work of establishing "such civill order as might be most pleasing unto God, and for the choosing the fittest man for the foundation work of a church to be gathered." A formal plantation covenant had already been solemnly entered into on "the first day of extraordinary humiliation" which the settlers had appointed after their arrival, and this covenant had sufficed until the time came for the more orderly structure. That time had now come.
Before any definite steps were taken, Davenport raised the fundamental question as to the qualifications of those who might best be entrusted with matters of government and fortified his recommendations with citations from the Old and New Testaments. The motion that all free burgesses should be church members- either of the church in New Haven or of one or other of the approved churches in New England-was not carried without dissent, for after the vote was taken Samuel Eaton arose to object. A discussion ensued but without altering the final decision, which they profoundly be- lieved expressed the mind of God. Hence the rule was
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established, similar to that laid down in Massachusetts and embodied in the Cotton code, that church members only should have the right to choose magistrates and officials, to transact public affairs, to make laws, divide inheritances, to decide all differences that might arise, and to do all other things of a like nature.
This having been decided, the church was next or- ganized by the selection of twelve men (actually eleven), who chose seven among themselves, as those most fit for the foundation work, the seven pillars of the structure. These seven pillars, adding to themselves nine more- and later others from time to time, formed a "general court" of the town. This court elected a magistrate and four deputies, whose duties were largely judicial, while the duties of the court itself (a kind of town meeting) were prudential. Theophilus Eaton was the magistrate for the first year and frequently afterward, and it was he who was responsible for the rejection of jury trial in the colony. Davenport was the pastor, but Eaton, head- strong and determined, was in large part the dictator of the settlement until his death in 1658. This was the general form of the government for the first four years, from 1639 to 1643, when, the church system remaining unchanged, there was superimposed upon the town gov- ernment a larger and more elaborate organization, that of the colony or jurisdiction. The circumstances that led to this enlargement were as follows.
During the years following the close of the Pequot War in 1637, the coast region saw the founding of many new settlements. Connecticut was furthering the plantations at Pequot, Stratford, and Fairfield; and New Haven also, as the Dutch expressed it, was "hiving further out." A second purchase in 1638 carried the latter's possessions so far to the east and west as to constitute an area thir-
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teen miles in length and ten in width. This would have been ample for a single plantation, but insufficient in Puritan eyes to meet the demand for expansion. All these early Puritan settlements were potentially the mothers of colonies and New Haven was no exception to the rule. Hardly was the work of organization well under way than the "hiving" began. In the autumn of 1639 the Rev. Peter Prudden and his band of faithful followers from Herefordshire, under the guidance of an experienced Indian fighter, Thomas Tibbals of Wethersfield, started westward through the woods to found the town of Mil- ford, ten miles away. Prudden had long desired, as had many a leading Puritan minister of the day, to have a settlement of his own. There is nothing to show that he and his company had ever intended to remain perma- nently in New Haven, as they had not remained in Bos- ton, or that any dissatisfaction with Davenport was the cause of their removal. They had already, in February, acquired land beyond the New Haven second purchase, and before starting on the new pilgrimage had, as a covenanted church body, chosen their own seven pillars and reaffirmed their own church covenant. On arrival at the site selected, this little company of fifty or more families used their church organization as an adequate civil government and stood for four years as an inde- pendent ecclesiastical republic in the wilderness. In near- ly all essentials they copied New Haven, but relaxed in some measure the rule regarding church membership, for there were ten men among them sharing in the man- agement of local affairs who were not covenanted Chris- tians. Four of these entered the church before 1643, but six remained outside, suffering thereby no loss of political privileges.
Eastward of New Haven and forming part of the
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second purchase was the locality known as Totoket, which in 1640 was allotted to Samuel Eaton for a plan- tation of his own and of a company that he was expected to gather in England and bring to America. Eaton, who had accompanied his brother and Davenport to New Haven and had lived there as a free burgess and house- holder for two years, returned to England for the purpose of gathering his company. But satisfied with conditions at home and probably none too well content with what New Haven offered him he never returned, and the pro- posed plantation at Totoket failed to materialize. Its place was taken later by another settlement, started, as we shall see, by a group of planters from Wethersfield and elsewhere, well hardened and acclimated, who began the plantation and town of Branford in 1644.
Ministerial leadership was a conspicuous factor in the founding of towns in the New Haven colony, as is seen in the settlement of Guilford. Stimulated by the example of Hooker, Cotton, and especially Davenport, the Rev. Henry Whitfield, who was a friend of Hooker's and had given him shelter at his rectory at Ockley in Surrey, finding it impossible, with his growing nonconforming views, to remain longer in England, gathered about him a group of his own family, friends, and parishioners, sold his property in Surrey, and prepared to migrate to Ameri- ca. He was never a separatist, even in the Massachusetts limited sense of the term, and found no difficulty, after his return to England in 1650, in taking up again his duties as a minister of the Church of England. He was intimate with Fenwick, who had gone home the year before and wishing to return joined the Whitfield group for the voyage. In this way Whitfield learned much about the country and was able to obtain from Fenwick per- mission to locate within the bounds of the territory given
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the Puritan lords and gentlemen by the Warwick deed, receiving later a definite grant from Fenwick for the pur- pose. Fenwick and his wife aided the expedition, sharing the cost of both vessel and supplies. Embarking on a ship of two hundred and fifty tons, the name of which is not known, on May 20, 1639, this company set out for New Haven, on the first transatlantic voyage directly to a harbor on the northern coast of Long Island Sound.
Adopting a plantation covenant during the passage, just as the Pilgrims had done in Plymouth harbor, this noteworthy company, consisting very largely of young men, some unmarried, others with wives, children, and servants, soon left New Haven, as Prudden had done and Samuel Eaton thought of doing, to found an inde- pendent plantation of their own. They bought land of the Indians at Menuncatuck, which they found "low, flat and moist, agreeable to their wishes," and there they remained a self-sustaining community and an independ- ent republic for four years. Unlike the people of Milford they erected their church after civil government had been established, and unlike both New Haven and Mil- ford, they confined political privileges not only to church members but to the members of their own particular church, thus creating the narrowest political franchise to be found anywhere in New England. This limitation of privilege was somewhat eased by a willingness to allow the nonfreemen or "planters," as was done in both Massachusetts and New Haven, to take part in town meetings but not to vote for town officials. Their pastor was the same John Higginson who had been Lady Fen- wick's chaplain at Saybrook. In their organization of government and in their management of town affairs they followed very closely the New Haven model.
Two other plantations were started the following year.
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It happened that Captain Nathaniel Turner, in the sum- mer of 1640, acting on behalf of the planters of New Haven, had purchased a section of land lying to the west along the coast beyond Fairfield at a place called Toquams or Rippowams, extending sixteen miles inland and eight miles from east to west. It lay some thirty miles from the Quinnipiac settlement. In the same year, owing to ministerial difficulties in the town of Wethers- field, a group of men there made up their minds to find a home elsewhere. At their head was the Rev. Richard Denton, one of the contentious clergymen, who had come from Halifax, England, and located in Wethersfield in 1638, and among its members were Matthew Mitchell, Andrew Ward, Richard Coe, and Richard Gildersleeve, the last named of whom had got into trouble with the Connecticut authorities for casting out "pernitious speeches, tending to the detriment and dishonnor" of the commonwealth. The company having determined to remove found it difficult to decide where to go and lis- tened willingly to overtures made by Davenport (who had already endeavored to bring peace to the Wethers- field church) that they should occupy the newly acquired territory. In the agreement finally made with New Haven the Wethersfield men bound themselves to reimburse that plantation for what it had already spent, to ac- knowledge the authority of the New Haven government, and to accept the system there established both in prin- ciple and form. Thus was brought into existence the plantation and town of Stamford, never a completely independent community, for it was always subordinate to New Haven, from the first sending deputies to the general or town court and accepting such of their own number as magistrates and constables as that court saw fit to select.
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