USA > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Cambridge > History of Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1630-1913 > Part 2
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The rude houses of Hooker's congregation were bought by a newly-arrived company, the flock of the Rev. Thomas Shepard. This firm but gentle leader, who left a deep impress on the habit of the town, was a youth of thirty-one, and a graduate, like many of the Massachusetts leaders, of Emmanuel College at Cambridge. He came to New England with a company of earnest followers, actuated, as he wrote, by desire for "the fruition of God's ordinances. Though my motives were mixed, and I looked much to my own quiet, yet the Lord let me see the glory of liberty in New England, and made me purpose to live among God's people as one come from the dead to His praise." His brave young wife died "in unspeakable joy" only a fortnight after his settlement at Newtowne, and was soon followed by the chief man of his flock and his closest friend, Roger Harlakenden, another godly youth of the manly type of English pioneers.
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THE FOUNDATIONS
At once, too, Shepard was plunged into the stormy debates of the Antinomian Controversy which nearly caused a permanent division in the Massachusetts churches. The general election of 1637, which was held on the Common at Newtowne, was a tumultuous gathering, and discussion over the merits of "grace" and "works" ran high till John Wilson, minister of the Boston church, climbed up into a big oak tree, and made a speech which carried the day for John Winthrop to the confusion of the heretical disciples of Anne Hutchin- son. Through these stormy waters Shepard steered his course so discreetly that he came into high favor among all people as a sound and vigilant min- ister, and Cotton Mather tells us that "it was with a respect unto this vigilancy and the enlightening and powerful min- istry of Mr. Shep- ard that, when the foundation of a college was to be laid, Cam- bridge, rather than any other place, was pitched upon to be the seat of that happy seminary."
Harry Vane-Milton's "Vane, young in years, but in sage counsel old"-being the Governor, the General Court of the colony passed the following memorable vote: "The Court agrees to give £400 towards a school or college- whereof £200 shall be paid the next year and £200 when the work is finished." Never were the foundations of such a structure laid by a community of men so poor, and under such sullen and averted stars. The colony was nothing but a handful of set- tlers barely cling- ing to the wind- swept coast; it was feeble and insignificant, in danger from In- dians on the one hand and foreign foes on the other; it was in throes of dissension on the matter of heresy which threatened to divide it, yet so resolved were the people that "the Commonwealth be furnished with knowing and un- derstanding men and the churches with an able ministry," that they voted the entire annual in- come of the col- ony to establish a place of learn- ing. In the fol-
The founding of Harvard College by the little colony was one of the most heroic, devout and fruitful events of American history. It was on the 28th day of October. 1636, Sir
lowing year the original vote was supple- mented by a further order that the college "is ordered to be at Newtowne, and that New- towne shall henceforth be called Cambridge."
II
THE FOUNDERS
W HAT manner of men were these who founded Cambridge? To say that they were English Puritans does not tell the whole story, for to many minds of the twentieth century Puritanism means little more than a harsh and narrow theology and a severe social and domestic discipline. We too easily forget that "the whole history of English progress since the Restoration has been the history of Puritanism." The Puritans were the people who carried the principles of the Protestant Reformation to their natural and logical applications. Wherever the Puri- tans went there went the seeds of "a church without a bishop and a state without a king." Macaulay said of them that they were "the most remarkable body of men which the world has ever produced." Hume wrote that "the precious spark of liberty had been kindled and was preserved by the Puritans alone;" and that "it is to them that the English owe the whole freedom of their Constitution." Carlyle called the Puritan movement "the last of all our Heroisms. ... Few nobler Heroisms,- at bottom perhaps, no nobler Heroism ever transacted itself on this earth."
The three Thomases who had most to do with the beginnings of Cambridge were typical Puritans. To follow the careers and describe the characters of Thomas Dudley, Thomas Hooker and Thomas Shepard is to reveal the motives and the potency of the Puritan move- ment. We can study these men now impar- tially and intelligently and the more we know of them the more cause have we to rejoice in our inheritances from them.
Thomas Dudley was a man of fifty-four when he came to America. With him came his wife, Dorothy Dudley, his son Samuel, a youth of twenty-two, and his four daughters, Anne, Patience, Sarah and Mercy. Anne was already the bride of stout Simon Bradstreet. Dudley was a native of Northamptonshire. His mother died when he was very young, and when
he was but fourteen years old his father, Cap- tain Roger Dudley, was killed fighting on the Protestant side at the Battle of Ivry. Cotton Mather records in his history that as soon as Thomas Dudley "had passed his childhood he was by those that stood his best friends preferred to be a page to the Earl of North- ampton, under whom he had opportunity to learn courtship and whatever belonged to civility and good behavior; with that earl he tarried till he was ripe for higher service." This appointment brought him into relations with one of the great families of the Midlands and put him in what Ben Jonson, who was two years older than Dudley, called the "succession for the noblest way
Of brushing up our youth in letters, arms, Fair men, discourses civil, exercise
And all the blazon of a gentleman."
Attaining his majority, Dudley, by the goodwill of Lord Compton, obtained a Captain's commission and led a company to the wars in France. At the siege of Amiens he fought under the great King Henry, of Navarre, in whose service his father had fallen seven years before. When Amiens surrendered Dudley came back to England and seems at once to have found employment as a clerk of the Court of Common Pleas, sitting at Westminster. His immediate connection was with Sir Augustus Nichols who, says Cotton Mather, "being his kinsman also by the mother's side, took more special notice of him; and from him, being a prompt young man, he learned much skill in the law, and attained to such abilities as ren- dered him capable of performing a secretary's place, for he was known to have a very good pen, to draw up any writing in succinct and apt expressions." At this time he married Dorothy Yorke, a daughter of one of his former neighbors in Northamptonshire and "a gentlewoman both of good estate and good extraction." She bore the five children who accompanied their parents to America, and
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THE FOUNDERS
shared all his adventures until her death at Roxbury in 1643.
The connection of Dudley with the Courts ceased with the death of Judge Nichols, but during this relationship Dudley must have lived right at the center of all the political and religious agitations of that stirring time. Those were the days when Shakespeare was living in London and when his plays were being produced at the Globe and Blackfriars theatres. The makers of the King James version of the Bible were at work in the Jerusalem Chamber at Westminster and finished their immortal labors in 1611. Francis Bacon was ruling in the realm of the intellect and Sir Edward Coke was laying the foundations of jurispru- dence. Sir John Eliot and Sir Thomas Went- worth were just coming into fame as the great antagonists in Parliament. With all these Dudley may well have come into personal relations.
But more than all those were the days when the passion for freedom and hatred of kingly and ecclesiastical oppression found utterance in England. The otherwise glorious reign of Queen Elizabeth was stained by horrible cruelty toward all who refused, for conscience sake, to conform to the dogmas and ceremonies of the Church of England. The Act of Suprem- acy and the Act of Uniformity made non- conformity first treason and then a felony. The progressive Protestants found Elizabeth as "bloody" as Mary; and the only alleviation was that the victims of ecclesiastical tyranny were hanged instead of burned.
Things were no better under Elizabeth's successor. James Stuart had been king of England but ten months when he invited the leading Puritan clergymen to meet himself and the bishops in a conference about the gov- ernment and ritual of the church. In the course of the discussion he lost his temper and stormed, as was his wont. The mention of the word "presbytery" lashed him into fury. "A Scottish presbytery," he cried, "agreeth as well with a monarchy as God and the Devil. Then Jack and Tom and Will and Dick shall meet, and at their pleasure censure me and 'my council, and all our proceedings. ... Stay I pray you, for seven years, before you demand that from me, and if then you find me pursy
and fat, and my windpipes stuffed, I will per- haps hearken to you. ... Until you find that I grow lazy, let that alone." One of the bishops declared that in this tirade his Majesty spoke by special inspiration from Heaven! The Puritans saw that they could expect nothing from the King. If any doubt remained, it was dispelled by the vicious threat with which the king broke up the conference. "I will make them conform," said he, "or I will harry them out of the land."
This purpose the King and the bishops proceeded to carry out with unspeakable cruelty, and with all the persecutions and the hangings Dudley, as an officer of the Court, must have been familiar. He was still pre- sumably a member of the Church of England; but more and more his sturdy common sense, his passion for reality, and his hatred of tyr- rany, inclined him to association with the per- secuted non-conformists.
In 1616 he was invited by the Earl of Lincoln to become the manager of his estates. Now the Earl was at that time the most conspicuous layman of the Puritan party and his house at Sempringham in Lincolnshire was in no small degree the head center of Puritan consultation and action. The eastern counties of England, the region between the Humber and the Thames, had for two centuries been the hotbed of heresy and independency. It was in Lincolnshire, Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex, and among the fens of Ely, Cambridge and Huntington, that Puritanism was strongest. It was as member and leading spirit of the Eastern Counties Association that Oliver Cromwell began his career; and, in the Civil War, East Anglia was from first to last the one region in which the supremacy of Parliament was unquestion- able and impregnable. While every one of the forty counties of England was represented among the settlers of Massachusetts, the eastern counties contributed far more than all the rest. An accurate investigator reports that
two-thirds of the American people who can trace their ancestry to New England might follow it back to East Anglia; one-sixth might follow it to the southwestern counties-Devon- shire, Dorset, and Somerset-which so long were foremost in maritime enterprise, and one-sixth to all the other parts of England put
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A HISTORY OF CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
together. It was not by accident that the oldest counties of Massachusetts were called Suffolk, Norfolk and Essex, that the Lincoln- shire Boston gave its name to the chief city of New England, and that names like Ipswich, Lynn, Chelmsford, Braintree, Sudbury, Haver- hill, Hingham and Needham appeared very early on the map of Massachusetts.
For fourteen years Dudley discharged the arduous duties of his office as the trusted "Steward" of the Earl of Lincoln. He rescued the estates from impending bank- ruptcy and proved himself a faithful and efficient man of business. At Sempringham he met all the Puritan leaders of the time and with them entered into high debate about all manner of things involving church and state. For a while he lived at the Lincolnshire Boston under the ministry of John Cotton, and again at Clipsham in Rutland, near the family of Isaac Johnson, who had married the Lady Arbella, sister of the Earl of Lincoln.
Meanwhile the stupid tyranny of the Stuart Kings and the bigotry of their ecclesiastical agents went on "harrying" the Non-conform- ists. Charles Stuart succeeded his father in 1623, and his character was such as to emphasize and increase the evils of his father's reign. Both father and son had some good intentions and both were sincere believers in their own theory of the business of being a King, while "for wrong-headed obstinacy and bottomless perfidy, there was nothing to choose between them." During the first four years of Charles' reign, the king's purpose to rule as an absolute monarch and the impossibility of expecting him to keep his promises became perfectly apparent. Despite all protest the king per- sisted in levying illegal taxes and to some extent was able to collect them. Men who refused to pay enforced loans were thrown into jail and the writ of habeas corpus was denied them. The treatment of the Non-conformists became even more severe, and fines, imprison- ment and exile for breaches of the ecclesiastical decrees became more and more common.
While affairs at home thus went from bad to worse, the news from abroad was equally discouraging. In France the surrender of Rochelle had ended the existence of the Pro- testants as an armed political party. In
Germany the terrible Thirty Years' War had just reached the darkest moment for the Protestants, and as yet there was no sign that Gustavus Adolphus was to cross the Baltic and bring the Swedish legions to the rescue of the cause of liberty. Everywhere in Europe the champions of freedom were hard pressed, if not completely overthrown. Well might the Puritans begin to look across the broad ocean and to wonder if they might not in the untamed wildness of the new continent find an escape from a situation that was fast becom- ing intolerable. The settlers of Jamestown in Virginia, for all their mishaps, had at least shown that the ocean could be overpassed and the wilderness tamed. The bold Separatists of Plymouth had pioneered the way to New England and for eight years had been clinging to the edge of the shaggy continent. "Learn wisdom, my countrymen," cried John White, the Puritan minister of Dorchester, "from the ruin which has befallen the Protestants at Rochelle and in the Palatinate; learn to avoid the plague while it is foreseen, and not to tarry as they did till it overtook them." The Puritan party in England was numerous and powerful, but none could foretell the issue of the impending conflict. Clearly it was well to establish a strong and secure retreat in America. What had been done at Plymouth by a few people of humble means might be done on a much greater scale by an association of men of larger resources.
Many were the conferences at Sempringham or at Boston or around the table at Emmanuel College at Cambridge. It was at a meeting of these Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire neighbors at the English Cambridge on the the 26th of August, 1629, that the agreement to emigrate to America was finally drawn up and signed by the twelve gentlemen who there- by adventured their lives and fortunes in the effort to plant a colony in the wilderness where they might embody their ideals of a Christian Commonwealth. We have sometimes been led to suppose that Puritanism meant the rule of narrow-minded Calvinist ministers, but the twelve signers of this agreement were all laymen, country gentlemen and men of affairs.
First stands the name of Sir Richard Salton- stall, one of the most magnanimous and broad-
THE FOUNDERS
19
minded of the Puritan leaders, the founder of Watertown, and the ancestor of one of the most serviceable of Massachusetts families. Dudley's name stands second. Then comes the name of William Vassall, the first of that family to appear in New England. We shall meet the descendants of William's brother, Samuel Vassall, later in this history, for they were the leading family in Cambridge in the days before the Revolution. Isaac Johnson and John Humphrey signed the agreement. Both were men of property and standing, brothers-in-law of the Earl of Lincoln. John- son was the largest subscriber to the joint stock of the company. He and his wife, the Lady Arbella, were among the first of the Colonists to die. Of her the New England historian Hubbard wrote that she came "from a paradise of plenty and pleasure into a wilder- ness of wants," and Cotton Mather adds that "she took New England in her way to heaven." She died in August, 1630, and her husband followed her a month later. His grave was the first made in what was later the King's Chapel burial ground. Winthrop wrote of him that "he was a holy man and wise, and died in sweet peace, leaving some part of his estate to the Colony." John Hampden was the executor of his will.
John Winthrop's name stands ninth on the list. He was at that time in his forty-second year, grave and modest, tender and true, a man already famed for the strength and beauty of his character, the weight of his judgment and the charity of his disposition. Increase Nowell was another signer, and was later Select- man of Charlestown for nineteen years, and for six years the faithful secretary of the Colony. Of the other signers William Colburn became the ruling Elder of the First Church in Boston, and William Pynchon laid the foundations of the town of Roxbury and later was the father of Springfield on the Connecticut. Of the remaining three, two failed to keep the agree- ment to emigrate and one returned to England after a very brief stay in Massachusetts.
.
The adventurers hastened to ally themselves with the Massachusetts Bay Company that had in the previous year secured the grant of a tract of land including all the territory between the Merrimac and the Charles Rivers,
and had already despatched John Endicott and his comrades to America. Of this com- pany Matthew Cradock, a wealthy Puritan merchant in London, was governor, and the records show that Sir Richard Saltonstall, Mr. Humphrey, Mr. Vassall and Mr. Nowell had been engaged in the enterprise from its beginning. Mr. Pynchon's name appears on the record as early as May 11, 1629, and Isaac Johnson's name appears in the governing board in the same month. Two days after the sign- ing of the Cambridge agreement, these six presented the articles of the agreement to the Company, and there was much discussion over the stipulation that the government of the Colony should be transferred from the meeting of the Company in London to the actual Colonists themselves settled or to be settled in New England. That was a vital issue and the decision meant much for the future destinies of America. The subject was first proposed at the meeting of the Com- pany on July 28, 1629, at the house of the Deputy-Governor, Thomas Goffe, in London, by Mr. Cradock, the then Governor of the Company, who "read certain propositions conceived by himself; viz., that for the ad- vancement of the plantation, the inducing and encouraging persons of worth and quality to transplant themselves and families thither, and for other weighty reasons therein contained, to transfer the government of the plantation to those that shall inhabit there, and not to continue the same in subordination to the Company here, as it now is."
The proposition was too important to be the subject of hasty decision, and the Record states that, "by reason of the many great and considerable consequences thereupon depend- ing, it was not now resolved upon." The members of the Company were requested to consider it "privately and seriously." This call for "private and serious" consideration furnishes abundant proof that the Company understood how important and how bold a measure their Governor had proposed to them. It was no mere measure of emigration or colo- nization. It was a measure of self-governing independence.
The General Court met again to consider this momentous matter on the 28th day of
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A HISTORY OF CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
August, 1629; but the interval had not been unimproved by those who desired to have the question wisely and rightly decided. It had cost them, we may well believe, many an anxious hour of deliberation and consultation; but the act of the signers of the Cambridge agreement settled the issue. The most sig- nificant clause of that memorable agreement stated the condition upon which the signers agreed so solemnly, "to pass the seas (under God's protection), to inhabit and continue in New England." The clause read:
"Provided always, that before the last of September next, the whole Government, to- gether with the patent for the said Plantation, be first, by an order of Court, legally trans- ferred and established to remain with us and others which shall inhabit upon the said Plan- tation."
These men were not proposing to go to New England as adventurers or traffickers; not for the profits of a voyage, or the pleasure of a visit; but "to inhabit and continue" there. And they were unwilling to do this while any merely subordinate jurisdiction was to be exercised there, and while they would be obliged to look to a Governor and Company in London for supreme authority. They were resolved, if they went at all, to carry "the whole Govern- ment" with them.
The decision of the question is thus entered upon the Records of the Company:
"Where, by erection of hands, it appeared, by the general consent of the Company, that the government and patent should be settled in New England."
The names of Winthrop and Dudley first appear on the Company's record as present at the meeting of October 15, 1629. Five days later, as the vote establishing the government in New England required that the officers should be chosen from those who were to emi- grate, Winthrop was elected governor in the place of Mr. Cradock, and John Humphrey was elected Deputy-Governor. Later Mr. Humphrey found that he must delay his departure and Dudley was chosen in his place.
The great Puritan exodus began in the following spring. Seventeen vessels sailed from England in April and May, bearing nearly a thousand souls to the new land. Dudley
had before him twenty-three years of noble service, and he never again revisited the pleasant fields. the stately church towers, the ancient dwellings of England. His personal history becomes the history of Massachusetts.
In all his varied career as a leader of the Massachusetts Colony, Dudley showed himself an efficient man of affairs, a resolute adminis- trator, a rigid disciplinarian and above all a man who had a profound sense of the immediate presence of God in the world and of his own accountability to him. He was an Old Testa- ment hero and could use with perfect sincerity the phrase with which the prophet Elijah began his speeches in each crisis of his life, "As the Lord liveth, before whom I stand." He did his work from day to day as in the sight of God. It mattered little to him what consequences followed his actions so long as he had the approval of his conscience. Duty was the supreme law, and he tested everything by appeal to moral sanctions. His piety was austere, and he was sometimes harsh in his moral judgments; but his ability, his rectitude, his indomitable fortitude, made him the trusted guide of his younger comrades and their stead- fast reliance in times of perplexity or peril. His blood flows in the veins of a host of the most distinguished of the sons and daughters of New England. The stock has been fruitful and serviceable to a remarkable degree.
As Thomas Dudley represents the sturdy, efficient, masterful Puritan layman, Thomas Hooker may well stand as the type of the fer- vent, high-minded, liberty-loving Puritan minister. He was born in the little Leicester- shire village of Marfield in 1586, so he was just ten years younger than Dudley. He had a good education and graduated at Emmanuel College at Cambridge in 1608, taking his Master's degree three years later. As we have already seen, Emmanuel College was, in the thought and language of the conservative churchman, "neither more nor less than a mere nursery of Puritans." It thoroughly justified that title. It trained its students in the love of freedom, in zeal for the simplicity of public worship, in hearty support of Protestantism against all "Popery and Prelacy," and in those ideas of church organization and discipline
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THE FOUNDERS
which the Puritans discovered in their Bibles. It represented the intensest spirit of non- conformity and of resistance to the oppressions of King and Bishop. Its services in training the founders of New England were pre-eminent. Of the first Massachusetts ministers the names of John Cotton, John Harvard, Thomas Shepard, Samuel Stone, Nathaniel Ward, and Thomas Hooker, and many another less known to fame, are borne on the roll of the graduates of Emmanuel.
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