A History of the Episcopal Church (Third Revised Edition). Robert W. Prichard
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the royal court in order to minister to his queen (Roman Catholic Henrietta Maria of France), thereby signaling to the nation his intention to modify the anti-Roman Catholic stance of his two predecessors. Second, he required the use of an edition of the Book of Common Prayer in Scotland, of which he (like all British monarchs after 1603) was also monarch.
The religious policy of the king and prelate solidified puritan opposition. Most puritans came to favor parliamentary authority over that of the king and to favor forms of church government in which authority was exercised by either regional gatherings of clergy and laity (presbyterian church order) or congregational meetings (congregational or independent church order) to government by bishops.
The colonists in Virginia were not particularly concerned with many of the issues that were hotly debated in Charles’s England. Colonial life was still too rough and tumble, for example, for ecclesiastical vestments to be a real option.28
Similarly, the role of bishops was more of a theoretical than a practical question, since no English bishop visited the colonies during the whole of the colonial period. Yet even so, the English debate during the years of Charles’s reign had a profound effect on the religious character of the colonies. It provided so great a distraction from the effort at colonization that settlers were able to remake religious institutions to fit their circumstances. It also changed the character of emigration.
In 1624, Charles prevailed upon his father, the then failing James I, to revoke the charter of the Virginia Company. Charles explained the action by referring to the high mortality rates and dissatisfaction among colonists in Virginia, but his major motive was political. He wanted a source of income that would be free of the control of a Parliament that was becoming increasingly critical of his policies.
Charles’s actions in the remainder of the decade made this motivation clear. He did not suggest major reforms in the management of the Virginia colony and generally paid less attention to it than had the officers of the Virginia Company. He allowed, for example, the Virginia Company’s clergy placement system to lapse without providing for any alternative procedure. When he did summon the colonial legislature in 1629, it was only to demand tax concessions. The colonial legislators rejected the tax proposal but took advantage of the session to adopt a plan for the designation of clergy. The members of the lower house of the legislature (the House of Burgesses) claimed the right to present clergy to the colonial governor for induction into parish positions. In the 1630s and 1640s, the burgesses would also provide legal regulations governing colonial vestries.29
The vestries were evolving institutions in England at the time. From the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, English Christians used the name vestry to refer to the regular meetings in which parishioners gathered to provide for the maintenance of church property. The situation changed, however, in 1598 when the English Parliament passed a law making vestries responsible for the care of the poor, a function carried out by monastic institutions before the Reformation. English Christians quickly learned that congregational meetings were not the most efficient means to meet such obligations. They began to elect select vestries composed of leading men in the parish who provided for the poor between sessions of the congregational meeting. During the seventeenth century, the English vestries took on additional duties that are carried out today by county governments. They cared for roads and replaced the decaying manorial court system in certain judicial matters.30
As English congregations and select vestries took such added responsibilities, some puritan members of the Church of England began to suggest that they should also acquire a role in the selection of clergy. This proposal was made in the Second Admonition to the Parliament (1572), which was probably written by Thomas Cartwright (1535–1603), and was one of the ideas advanced by Walter Travers (c. 1548–1635) that led Richard Hooker (c. 1554–1600) to write Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1593–97).31 English parishes never acquired the right to select their own clergy, but some colonial vestries did. This would be the case in Virginia, where the indifference of Charles I made it possible by the 1630s for some vestries to select their own rectors. By 1643, the legislature abandoned its claim to designate clergy and incorporated vestry appointment in its religious statutes.32 The Virginia precedent would not be followed by the Church of England in all of the remaining colonies, however. When, for example, the English government established the Church of England in Maryland at the end of the century, it gave to the governor the authority to assign clergy. After the American Revolution, however, the Virginia practice became the general rule in the American church.33
Virginia vestries attempted to revise English vestry-clergy relations in another way. English clergy, once inducted into their parishes, could only be dismissed by their bishops and then only for grave offenses.34 In a similar way, clergy in the Virginia colony, once inducted into their parishes by the governor, had life tenure; their vestries could not dismiss them. Colonial vestries tried to get around this situation by neglecting to present their new rectors to the governor, offering their clergy a series of one-year contracts instead. In most cases, these contracts were renewed each year, producing a stable relationship between vestry and clergy. Where disputes did arise, however, nonpresentation provided the vestry with an effective weapon.35 Again, not all the colonies would follow the Virginia practice of nonpresentation during the colonial era. But after the American Revolution, the Episcopal Church in the United States adopted a canon (1804) that bore some resemblance to the de facto Virginia arrangement; it made it possible for vestries in dispute with their clergy to appeal to their bishops for a termination of the rector’s tenure in circumstances that would never have been allowed under English canon law of the same period.
The second way in which Charles’s religious policy affected colonial religion was through emigration. In 1630, whole communities of members of the Church of England who favored congregational polity took advantage of a generous royal charter and moved to New England. Almost from its inception, this settlement was larger in population than Virginia. Indeed, the colonists soon moved beyond the Massachusetts Bay territory into what would later become the separate colonies of New Hampshire and Connecticut. Going beyond the innovations of the settlers in Virginia, they limited church membership to those who could give accounts of their conversion and abandoned use of the Book of Common Prayer. With king and bishops safely distant in London, they were in little danger of being contradicted. On the contrary, John Winthrop (1588–1649) and other members of the new colony hoped that their innovations would provide a model that would be followed back home.
The religious policy of the growing New England colony distanced it not only from the church in England but also from the Virginia colony to the south. The two colonies, separated geographically by the Dutch colony of New Netherlands, attracted colonists from different parts of England. Two-thirds of the New England colonists came from the eastern counties of England’s East Anglia.36 The clergy in Virginia, whose geographical patterns usually matched those of the parishioners whom they served, came predominantly from the north and west of England.37 Differences that already existed in England were only amplified in America.
Massachusetts Bay was not the only new colony chartered by Charles. Interested in the fortunes of Roman Catholics at the royal court, he also gave his Roman Catholic secretary of state, George Calvert (1580?–1632), permission to create a colony (Maryland, charted in 1632). The first colonists sailed two years later. The majority of the wealthier emigrants would be Roman Catholics, but from the start they only constituted a minority of