Abstract
In 1636, 13 English Puritan ministers sent a letter to the ministers of Massachusetts with a request for information about various elements of Massachusetts church government. After a number of consultations, the Massachusetts ministers responded in early 1638 with their own letter and a detailed response written anonymously by John Davenport. The English ministers responded with another letter and a lengthy response written at their request by one of their members, John Ball. The English reply miscarried, and by the time this trans-Atlantic postal mishap got sorted out, Parliament was in the throes of reforming the English church. In 1643, word that the New Englanders’ response was going to be published prompted Presbyterians to make a preemptive strike and publish the entire exchange. That publication in turn prompted a second New England response, by two original participants, the ministers Thomas Shepard and John Allin. Their tract, written in 1645 had one eye in the issues of the 1630s and another on the alarmingly unstable state of church reform in England.1
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Notes
John Davenport’s response appeared as Answer to Nine Positions about Church-Government which was published with two other responses to English queries in Richard Mather, Church-Covenant Discussed (1643).
There are a few inconsequential textual variations between this version and the one printed in the compendium of the exchange ushered into print by Simeon Ashe and William Rathband, A Letter of Many Ministers in Old England (1643). The sheets were given a new title page and a livelier title focusing on John Ball’s contribution the next year: Tryall of the New-Church Way in New-England… by that Learned and Godly Minister of Christ, John Ball (1644).
The sheets of John Allin and Thomas Shepard, A Defence of the Answer made unto the Nine Questions or Positions Sent from New-England (1648), were given a new title page and reissued as A Treatise of Liturgies, Power of the Keys, and Matter of the Visible Church (1653). Ball, Tryall, sig. A2v.
For a discussion of the literature on Ball see Michael P. Winship, Godly Republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims, and a City on a Hill (Cambridge, MA, 2012), p. 291 n. 11.
Nicholas Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism, c. 1530–1700 (Manchester, 2001), p. 57.
This fraught, politically constructed consensus moment in Puritanism is essentialised in books like Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559–1625 (Oxford, 1983).
Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation England (Oxford, 2013).
Thomas Edwards, Antapologia (1644), p. 22.
Richard Baxter, Reliquiae Baxteriana (1696), iii. 19.
John Ball, An Answer to Two Treatises of Mr. John Can (1642), sig.
A3 [1]r-v. For the context of Ball’s encounter with the Congregationalist, see Peter Lake, ‘The “Court,” the “Country” and the Northamptonshire Connection: Watching the “Puritan opposition” think (historically) about politics on the eve of the English Civil War’, Midland History 35 (2013), pp. 28–70.
A. F. Scott Pearson, Thomas Cartwright and Elizabethan Puritanism, 1535–1603 (Cambridge, 1925), p. 392; Ann Hughes, ‘Ashe, Simeon (d. 1662)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v.
Samuel Clarke, A Generall Martyrologie (1651), p. 468; Keith L. Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism: A History of English and Scottish Churches of the Netherlands in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Leiden, 1982), p. 120.
John Paget, A Defence of Church-Government, Exercised in Presbyteriall, Classicall, & Synodall Assemblies (1641), sig *2r.
Sargent Bush Jr., ed., The Correspondence of John Cotton (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002), p. 264.
Ball, Friendly Tryall, p. 72. Richard Mather also discusses the elders’ ‘negative voice’, Church Government and Church-Covenant Discussed (1643), p. 62. Shepard and Allin, Defence, p. 168, call it the ‘constant practice’ in Massachusetts. In a manuscript by Richard Mather written in 1645 published as An Answer to Two Questions (Boston, 1712), pp. 17–18, Mather uses a different argument to come to the same conclusion. For the Cambridge Platform see Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana (Hartford, 1855), ii. 224.
Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 47, 244–7.
Sprunger, Dutch Puritanism, pp. 168–70, 226–31; Ann Hughes, ‘Thomas Dugard and His Circle in the 1630s — A “Parliamentary-Puritan” Connexion?’ Historical Journal 29 (1986), p. 787.
William Laud, The History of the Troubles and Tryal of the Most Reverend Father in God and Blessed Martyr, William Laud (1695), p. 554; Bremer, Congregational Communion, p. 120.
John Ball, A Friendly Triall of the Grounds Tending to Separation (Cambridge, 1640), sig. Bv, pp. 12, 157.
Clarke, Generall Martyrologie, pp. 448, 449; Edward Arber, A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554–1640 A.D. (London, 1875), iv. 504.
Thomas Shepard, The Parable of the Ten Virgins Opened and Applied, third edition (1695), 2nd pag.: pp. 183, 184.
William Bridge, Jeremiah Burroughes, Thomas Goodwin, Philip Nye, Sidrach Simpson, An Apologeticall Narration (1643), pp. 22–3.
William Bartlett, Ichnographia (1647), pp. 118–20 (mispaginated as p. 10).
Nathaniel Rogers, A Letter Discovering the Cause of Gods Wrath against the Nation (1644), p. 5.
Richard Baxter, A Defence of the Principles of Love (1671), p. 13.
Thomas Edwards, Antapologia (1644), p. 15.
London Provincial Assembly, A Vindication of the Presbyteriall-Government, and Ministry (1650), p. 113.
Paget, A Defence of Church-Government; William Rathband, A Briefe Narration of Some Church Courses Held in Opinion and Practise in the Churches Lately Erected in New England (1644).
Thomas Edwards, Reasons Against the Independent Government of Particular Congregations (1651), p. 32. I thank Elliot Vernon for pointing out the possible Rathband connection in a conversation.
Thomas Lechford, Plain Dealing, or, Newes from New-England (1642), p. 69.
Ball, Friendly Triall, sig. A2 [iii], r-v; Thomas Goodwin, Works (Edinburgh, 1865), ix. 529.
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Winship, M.P. (2015). Straining the Bonds of Puritanism: English Presbyterians and Massachusetts Congregationalists Debate Ecclesiology, 1636–40. In: Gribben, C., Spurlock, R.S. (eds) Puritans and Catholics in the Trans-Atlantic World 1600–1800. Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World, 1500–1800. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137368980_6
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