“Godly republicanism” is a deliberately provocative title intended to jolt the reader into a reconsideration of both the political and religious origins of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Faced with an unsympathetic monarch and a persecuting Laudian church, the embattled puritans and their nonconformist clergy obtained a company charter permitting them to settle in America. What needs to be explained, Michael Winship argues, is how and why the colonists managed within six years of arriving to transform their charter into a functioning republic presided over by a governor and his court of Assistants, elected by freemen defined as those recognized as godly by a covenanted church, in short a commonwealth in which citizenship was limited to those saints believed worthy of receiving the sacraments at a congregational church. This unlikely ecclesiastical republic survived with modifications until the company charter was vacated by an English court in 1683, the chief justice referring to the Bay colonists as “a company of Rebells” (247).

Perry Miller's seminal Orthodoxy in Massachusetts (1933) essentially wrote the Plymouth colony out of the picture, a side-show, lacking any ideological impact on the Bay Colony, which was non-separating congregationalist from its inception. Most historians since have followed in Miller's footsteps. Winship has shaped his narrative and argument to suggest otherwise, that in fact Plymouth was crucial in shaping Salem's separatist congregationalism months before Winthrop's fleet reached Massachusetts Bay. When Winthrop's company first worshipped on the American shore, it was at Salem where they witnessed a fully separatist, covenanted church, which welcomed them but reserved the Lord's Supper and Baptism to members of recognizably separatist congregations. John Cotton, an old friend of Arthur Hildersham, one of the survivors of the Elizabethan presbyterians, wrote in a rather testy letter to Salem's pastor, John Skelton, “you went hence of another judgment, and I am afraid your chaunge hath sprung from new-Plimouth-men” (147). While following the Salem example of a covenanted, congregational church of those who could testify to their godliness, Cotton's Boston church did not adopt a similar exclusivity. Nevertheless, as John Endicott, the future governor of the Bay Colony, wrote to Samuel Fuller of Plymouth, testifying that he was “satisfied touching your judgments of the outward forme of Gods worshipe” (142), in the final analysis Plymouth, Salem, and Boston all agreed that the pattern for their churches, separatist and non-separatist, was necessarily based on the example provided by the New Testament churches.

One of the many merits of Winship's subtle and nuanced picture of the complex ecclesiology of which the New Englanders were inheritors—a history stretching back to the Elizabethan presbyterians, Cartwright and Travers, and to Field and Wilcox's attempt to create a presbyterian church within the Established Church—generating in its disappointments Robert Browne's A Treatise of Reformation without Tarrying for Anie (1582), the first separatist manifesto. Repression generated by Archbishop's Whitgift's subscription campaign and by his successor Bancroft's new canons of 1604, led to new experiments in gathered churches, such as Barrow and Greenwood's, and to new attacks on the tyranny of episcopal rule, such as William Bradshaw's defense of congregational autonomy in 1605. Three years later unhappy Nottinghamshire puritans and their clerical leaders left for Amsterdam, already the home of dissident puritan congregations, were free from tyrannical bishops their ministers found an arena in which to argue the merits of presbyterianism and non-separating and separatist congregationalism. A dozen years of argument and experiment among the various English congregations in Amsterdam and Leiden preceded the departure of the Nottinghamshire congregation for America.

At tiny Plymouth church and state in the early years were essentially one. Lacking a minister, William Bradford was both elder of the church and governor of the struggling colony. From the outset Massachusetts Bay presented a more complex problem, as Winship shows, first, of transforming a chartered company, theoretically answerable to the King and Privy Council of England, into a government free of outside interference (relatively easy at a distance of 3,000 miles from an English government facing multiple problems of its own), and, second, of transforming an oligarchic structure of a company governor and assistants into a government compatible with colonists rapidly forming covenanted churches in which the godly laity participated in forming the covenant and in electing their ministers and elders. The puritans' recent experience of a monarch who arrested those who opposed the forced loans and then, having signed the Petition of Right, continued to collect taxes not granted by Parliament on the grounds of necessity while imprisoning those London merchants who refused to pay provided a dramatic political lesson in the costs of tyranny. Thus there was no question that the oligarchic company charter would survive unchanged. As John Cotton was to explain, “worldly men” might become a majority and “turn the edge of all authority and laws against the church and its members,” to prevent which political freedom must be based on church membership. At the same time, puritan distrust of unregenerate man suggested, as Cotton put it, that “none are so fit to be trusted with the liberties of the commonwealth as church members” (196–197).

Such a brief sketch of Winship's argument and evidence can do no more than point to what is in fact a richly suggestive text. Winship does not claim that this godly republic was a prototype of the secular republic of the late eighteenth-century revolutionaries, but he does present a story of the past that gives one to think, particularly in the light of a brilliant last chapter on Algernon Sidney, proto-Enlightenment theorist and godly Calvinist.

There is no bibliography, and the notes, essential to an understanding of Winship's evidence and argument, appear annoyingly as seventy-seven pages of endnotes. That said, this is a splendid book, evidence if needed of an historian equally at home on both sides of the Atlantic.