Is there anything more to say about religious and political culture in early New England? The books under review, both by distinguished historians of early American Puritanism, offer a resounding yes, challenging us to consider previously marginal or marginalized characters and themes and shining new light on venerable controversies. For Frank Bremer it is the experience and distinctive vision of the radical Puritan divine Richard Davenport. For Michael Winship it is the significance of the English separatist tradition, long considered epiphenomenal in New England but here reinterpreted as foundational to its distinctive religious culture. Both offer perspectives that fit within what Stephen Foster called the long argument of the English Reformation, while maintaining a sense of what was particular, if never “exceptional,” in New England.Footnote ¹ In so doing, the authors have produced books that will command attention on both sides of the Atlantic, drawing readers from the ranks of early modern English historians no less than their colonial American peers.

Bremer reports being drawn to Davenport as a topic while still in graduate school by Perry Miller's characterization of the settlement at New Haven as the most clearly distilled example of the ambition to establish a Bible commonwealth in America. Just as in his biography of John Winthrop, Bremer captures the energy and idealism that lay behind the complexities of predestination and covenant theology, particularly the manner in which the development of Davenport's beliefs combined with his earthly project of reforming the self and community. Born in 1597 to a prominent Reformed Coventry family, Davenport enjoyed a middle-class upbringing and, thanks to a generous uncle, began studies at Oxford. However, although once a prosperous wool town, by the late sixteenth century Coventry was in decline. When uncle's money ran out Davenport had to leave Oxford for a position with a Northumberland family who engaged him to preach the Reformed religion to their unlettered and mostly Catholic neighbours. In these early years Davenport participated in the local and often intense contests between different views of Reformed and established religion that generated England's broad-based Puritan opposition to the official church polity and doctrine. In 1618 the newly married Davenport's abilities as a preacher were recognized with the first of several London lectureships, culminating with an appointment position as vicar of St. Stephens in London's Colman Street, a centre of Reformed radicalism.

His career progress and salary allowed Davenport to pay his university debts and finally secure his degree. By the early 1620s he was one of many reformers followed and reported upon by spies in the pay of William Laud. Using these reports and other reflections Bremer sketches Davenport's network of supporters and fellow travellers and the development of orthodox and moderate arguments regarding the need to pursue reform while preserving unity that required unpalatable compromises with established church and Arminian doctrine. Increasing acrimony over James I and then Charles I's pro-Spanish foreign policy persuaded some to leave – first for Ireland and Holland then for America. Davenport was associated with the Massachusetts Bay Company, but left for Leiden in 1634. In Holland he enjoyed freedom from surveillance and engaged in vigorous debates with other sects, becoming ever more uncompromising in his commitment to congregational autonomy and the purity of church membership. When news of the success of early American settlements, and the intensification of Laudian investigations, reached Holland in the mid-1630s, Davenport teamed up with the Puritan grandee and long-standing Coventry acquaintance Theophilus Eaton, and planned a move to New England.

Thus we are almost halfway through the book before we get to America and the cast of characters and storylines one expects in an early New England tale. In the first half Bremer has used the life of Davenport to take us through complex political and doctrinal debates which are available elsewhere in other studies, but not in nearly so digestible and gripping a form. Using Davenport's experience to chart the ins and outs of debates and the growing disaffection of English Puritans, Bremer provides an ideal survey for introducing undergraduate students to recent and often befuddling doctrinal debates. Once in America, Davenport is impressed by the freedom enjoyed by colonists to establish churches as they see fit. He identifies with Winthrop and Thomas Shepherd in the antinomian or (as Winship elsewhere insists) Free Grace crisis. Urged to remain in Boston, Davenport elects to move south and settle on land along the Long Island Sound taken during the Pequot War. Here he and Eaton and their followers establish their New Haven from which to continue the preparations for the second coming. Davenport sets out his vision in publications on civil government and, inspired by biblical parallels and Baconian natural science, in the physical layout of the colony. In richly researched chapters Bremer describes the subtle balance between religion and the politics of New Haven's founding, reminding us that what is still too often described as Puritanism was a far from monolithic ideology with considerable variety from place to place. Thus the conversion narratives that were the source of controversy in Boston played little or no part in New Haven. Davenport and his cofounders required church members to demonstrate evidence of godly behaviour and true profession of faith, but the stress was daily life and knowledge of Scripture more than public statements of religious piety.

Thereafter Bremer surveys daily life, family order, and the provision for education in the colony, as well as relations with neighbouring Indian and colonial communities which ultimately swamped New Haven. The colony's poor economic prospects were an early and major problem: farming proved unproductive, poor inland access made fur trade inaccessible, and plans to expand to Delaware were stymied by the Dutch in New Netherland. Over time discontent in the town grew, especially with the exclusivity of church membership amongst traders who had never really shared religious mission. Following outbreak of the Civil Wars, Davenport and his associates sent advice and assistance to English republicans and joined in plans to expel the Dutch from New Netherland. For a time it must have seemed to reformers that their bold and idealistic experiment was bound for success. This made the disappointment following the collapse of the republic and return of the Stuarts even harder to bear. Overcome by internal colonial wrangles over church admission and the restored and unsurprisingly antithetical Stuarts, New Haven was absorbed by the larger and aggrandizing Connecticut in 1662.

Where Bremer's biography and micro-history give us the perspective of one man, Michael Winship provides an equally compelling view of the broader intellectual and doctrinal context within which believers such as Davenport developed their zealous commitment to congregational autonomy and lay governance. Winship begins where Bremer/Davenport finished up, with the weakening of the commitment to religious purity and the authority of godly lay church members that was the essence of congregational autonomy. Invoking Joshua Scottow's 1691 lament for “what is become of the primitive zeal, piety, and holy heat found in the hearts of our parents” (1–3), Winship traces the origin of this “holy heat” to late sixteenth-century English debates and the determination of reformers to turn back the power of the Antichrist who, in their view, had been on the rise ever since Christ's ascension into Heaven and who remained evident in attempts to concentrate power in fewer and fewer closely managed and corrupt churches detached from true believers. Winship notes various historiographical tendencies that have obscured this sacred political theory: a long-standing reaction to an earlier and simplistic Whig reading of Puritanism's relation to constitutionalism and, more recently, a failure to credit sixteenth-century religious debates with nascent civic republicanism that flourished during the English republic. Both have led to the imposition of mental boundaries between church government and political history. Winship's departure point is the commitment of contemporaries to the interdependence of civil society and the glorification of God that combined secular and divine principles and anxieties in ways that have to be grasped together and can only be underappreciated apart.

He begins with the arguments between Thomas Cartwright and John Whitgift in the 1560s and 1570s: two Cambridge academics, each convinced that he is right and his opponent a dangerous dissembler. Cartwright, the Presbyterian, considered the English church, with top-down control by the monarchy and its bishops, a roadblock to reform and door through which the Antichrist or his agents could return. Further, necessary reform and a pure church could only follow from the administration of presbyters or elders elected by autonomous congregations. For its supporters, Presbyterianism was not only the most suitable form of church government for a consular monarchy, it was also a prophylactic against tyranny. For Whitgift and the Anglicans, Cartwright and his supporters were stalking horses for ungodly challenges to monarchical power and the authority of the state, which they felt few qualms about using to shut down their troublesome opponents. Thus began the process whereby church republicanism became civic, Elizabethan church reformers fearing that, in attempting to crush Puritanism, its opponents, or the spirit of the Antichrist working through them, were subverting the monarchy and English freedoms requiring them to resist; the establishment equally sure of the need to break a radical and dangerous threat to the Crown and the common good. These latent civic possibilities, which flourished in the Massachusetts and later English commonwealth, develop under the pressure of disappointment and later repression under James I and Charles I. The importance of separatism, long considered a sideshow in New England Puritan historiography but here rehabilitated, is its admittedly sometimes inchoate but nevertheless single-minded advocacy of the autonomy of individual churches and lay government through the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Many moderates reached compromises and accommodations with the Crown and the established church, choosing to focus on piety and moral reform. But this was insufficient to prevent mutation of Presbyterianism into Congregationalism in the early 1600s and for extremists in the Midlands to begin departure for Holland to continue debating forms of Congregationalism and plan migration to America. In effect, Winship provides a panoramic view of the world of belief and debate within which Davenport shaped his views of Congregationalism.

Once in America (chapter 5), Winship argues for the influence of separatist Plymouth over its more populous and enduring Congregationalist neighbour, the Massachusetts Bay Company settlement. Whereas historians since Miller have argued that separatist tendencies particularly in the Salem and other early churches owed little to Plymouth, Winship considers the Pilgrim community an exemplar and catalyst for Massachusetts Congregationalism, with long-term consequences on both sides of the Atlantic. It is this Plymouth-influenced separatism, rather than doctrines imported from English divines, that gives Massachusetts Calvinism its uncompromising edge, creating the conditions for controversies such as Antinomianism, the Robert Child affair, and the Half-Way Covenant. Indeed, this edge was part of the appeal of Massachusetts churches, not least to Davenport, which permitted them to embrace congregational autonomy and the shunning of churches they deemed impure – while at the same time claiming not to have fallen into the error of separatism. This was a function, in part, of distance from the Anglican Church, in part of a sense of their own insecurity. Thus Winship reads Winthrop's famous “city upon a hill” speech more with Dwight Bozeman as a statement of concern at being seen to fail, than as the upbeat assessment of Miller and New England as exemplar of purity for other European churches. Of course, the demands and power of ordinary men and women in local society and politics – captured in the famous New England community studies – might also be claimed as underpinnings for the tenacious independence of those whom John Smith called men of “small means.”Footnote ² But therein lies the fallacy of drawing divisions between separatist-influenced Congregationalism and secular autonomy; the two are coeval.

Winship's provocative and persuasive reading allows him to sally through the familiar New England narrative tackling long-standing debates and unresolved queries. For example, historians have long puzzled over the decision of Winthrop and his assistants to open up the company's freemanship, and thus governance, to male householders and church members soon after arriving. But this becomes clearer when one sees it as a demonstration of commitment to the principle of combating the negative tendencies of hierarchy and hereditary government through inclusion and lay governance. Of course there were limits to the leaders’ liberal principles: Roger Williams's attacks were quickly intolerable. Although, again, in Winship's account Williams's criticism of the Massachusetts churches’ refusal formally to disown corrupt English parish churches appears less as an isolated voice and more as articulation of a principle close to separatism and the colony's beliefs – but impractical for community building. Winship's take on the relationship between sacred political theory and republicanism previously described by J. G. A. Pocock is similarly persuasive. Pocock's famous Machiavellian Moment describes the point at which a republic confronts the danger of its degeneration and attempts to remain morally and politically stable in the face of corruption and loss of virtue. In Massachusetts the dynamic was the same, but secular republican stability was situated within an ambitious religious framework. However, after mid-century, English anxieties regarding the limitations of Congregationalism as the basis of a national church prompted moves toward Presbyterianism, leaving New Englanders isolated.

In closing, Winship also endeavoured to secure puritanism's republican legacy. Since the mid-twentieth century, scholars have attributed the republican ideas that came to dominate eighteenth-century political theory to a handful of mid-century and later political activists and writers who in their effort to secure liberty produced studies of government with a strongly antimonarchical bias. These “commonwealth men” were by no means narrow scripturalists – if anything anti-Calvinist – and inspired the Whigs who bore the Atlantic republican tradition to America. But if Calvinism's pessimistic predestination was incompatible with classical republicanism, does this leave Massachusetts's godly republicanism as a piece of Civil War ephemera with shallow roots and a fast death, a historical oddity rather than an English road not taken? Not so, says Winship, claiming key mid-century authors, such as Algernon Sidney, as late Puritans rather than early Atlantic republicans. Thus comparing Sidney's early (1660s) and later (1680s) writings he finds distinctions between his sacred political theory and that practised in Massachusetts, but also striking similarities in their conceptions of history and the apocalyptic struggles of God's chosen people. Rather than a clean break, it seems the Whigs adapted godly republicanism which clung on in Massachusetts until the Glorious Revolution broke the link between church membership and government.

Far from over, it seems that arguments concerning the religious and political culture in early New England may be just about to begin (again).