A History of the Episcopal Church (Third Revised Edition). Robert W. Prichard
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colonists were Protestant in sympathy.
In the following decade, Charles was no longer in a position to authorize new colonization. He was locked in a losing power struggle with the puritans that required all his attention. In 1640 Scottish presbyterians, unhappy with the episcopacy and the Scottish Book of Common Prayer (1637), invaded England. Charles summoned two sessions of Parliament to raise money for an English army, but a presbyterian majority in the House of Commons allied itself with the Scots against the king. The presbyterians joined with the army of Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658), composed primarily of puritan independents (congregationalists), to win the resultant Civil War. The victors executed both Archbishop Laud (1645) and Charles I (1649). With the king and archbishop removed, the Parliament reshaped the Church of England, abolishing the prayer book, the episcopate, and the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion. An assembly of puritan divines, summoned by the Parliament to meet at Westminster Abbey, drew up a new confession of faith (the Westminster Confession of Faith) and liturgy (Directory for Public Worship of God, 1645).
The victory of the presbyterian party was, however, only partial. Backed by Oliver Cromwell, independent puritans were able to resist Parliament’s efforts to bring all of English puritanism under the new presbyterian form of church government. In 1653, Cromwell asserted his authority over the Parliament more openly; he dissolved the legislative body and ruled alone as England’s Lord Protector. He continued to rule until his death in 1658.
English colonists in the New World acted in a predictable manner. New Englanders, from the same East Anglian towns that were centers of presbyterian and congregational opposition to the crown, supported the Parliament. The colonists in Virginia, Maryland, Bermuda and Barbados, from areas of England in which loyalist sentiments were strong, generally favored the royal family. A third group of colonists, dissenters who objected not only to the episcopal but also to the presbyterian and congregational forms of discipline and doctrine, took advantage of the confusion in England to form a colony in Rhode Island (first charter in 1644) and to establish a dissenting foothold in the Bahamas (arrival of dissenters from Bermuda in 1648). Cromwell sent an expedition to the Caribbean in 1655 that would add Jamaica to the English colonial possessions, taking it from the Spanish.
The Civil War in England may have contributed to a second attack on the colonists by Native Americans. In 1644 Opechancanough, angered by the growing English encroachment on Native American land, sent warriors to drive out the colonists, attacking and destroying their homes, crops, and livestock. The English responded in kind and by 1646 had captured and executed the elderly Opechancanough, enslaved Native American combatants, and imposed annual tribute payments on the remaining Native Americans. By the reckoning of at least one colonist, it was awareness of the civil war taking place in England that led the Native Americans to attack when they did.38
The Colonies after the Restoration
Charles I’s son, Charles II (king, 1660–85), returned to England from exile on the continent in 1660, invited by a Parliament that was dissatisfied with Richard Cromwell’s attempt to succeed his father. With Charles II’s restoration, the episcopal party recaptured the Parliament and ended the Church of England’s experiment with presbyterian government. Anxious to prevent any repetition of the Civil War, the episcopal party in Parliament not only reestablished the episcopacy, the prayer book (Book of Common Prayer 1662), and the traditional Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, but also enacted legislation to guarantee continued dominance in the Church of England. The Parliament required, for example, that all clergy in the Church of England who were ordained during the presbyterian years be reordained by bishops or forfeit their positions. It also strengthened the language in the prayer book’s preface about the requirement that clergy read Morning and Evening Prayer daily. The new edition of prayer book also contained a provision about confirmation that members of the Church of England in the colonies used to advantage. Earlier editions of the Book of Common Prayer included a rubric requiring confirmation as a prerequisite for reception of communion. The 1662 edition amended that rubric to say that one had to “be confirmed, or be ready and desirous to be confirmed.”39
Many presbyterians, congregationalists, and independents—particularly among the clergy—refused to accept the Parliament’s realignment of the Church of England. Approximately three hundred thousand laypersons and one-fifth of the clergy withdrew from the Church of England and formed separate dissenting denominations.40 The Parliament tolerated the new groups but adopted the Clarendon Code to limit their privileges. The code’s Five Mile Act, for example, forbade dissenting ministers from living within five miles of any town or parish in which they had served.
The strategy led to a decline in the number of dissenters in England; there were only fifty thousand left in 1750.41 It provided, however, an increased motivation for dissenting emigration to the colonies, where the provisions of the Clarendon Code were not systematically enforced. The puritans in Massachusetts, for example, retained rights and privileges under their royal charter, despite the fact they organized as a denomination (the Congregational Church) outside of the Church of England. Charles II, moreover, granted a new royal charter to Congregationalists in the Connecticut Valley (1662). The Church of England, a majority church at home, was soon outnumbered more than three to one by dissenters in the colonies. Only in Virginia, Bermuda, and a few British possessions in the Caribbean was the Church of England established by law, and even they were slow to enforce Parliament’s new religious legislation. As late as 1686, a Virginia vestry, for example, elected a rector who had not complied with the requirement for episcopal ordination.42
The Restoration did not, however, finally settle the religious debate in England. The Parliament was strongly episcopal in sentiment, but both Charles II and his brother James II (King, 1685–88) were deeply attracted to Roman Catholicism. Charles II made a deathbed profession to Rome, and James followed an open Roman Catholic policy. When James II introduced Roman Catholic worship at the universities, put Roman Catholics at the head of the army, and arrested seven bishops of the Church of England, the Parliament rebelled against him (the Glorious Revolution, 1688).
Charles and James had pursued their religious goals in a way that contributed to the growth of Presbyterian, Congregational, and other dissenting groups in the colonies. Believing that granting toleration to dissenting Protestants in the colonies was the first step toward toleration of Roman Catholics, Charles renewed the charter of Baptists in Rhode Island (1663) and granted a charter to Quaker William Penn for Pennsylvania (1681). In addition, he made no provisions for the establishment of the Church of England in the charters for the Carolinas (1663) or the territory in New Jersey and New York (1664) that the English had taken from the Dutch. In the year before he was removed from the throne, James attempted to follow his brother’s colonial policy with a Declaration of Indulgence, which would have removed legal penalties against dissenting Protestants and Roman Catholics in England itself. During Charles II’s reign, Presbyterians emigrated in increasing numbers to New York and New Jersey, where neither the Church of England nor the Congregational Church was established and where the Dutch Calvinists, who predated the English, represented a theological tradition similar to their own. By the next century, English, Scottish, and Irish Presbyterians would prove as numerous in the British colonies on the American mainland as members of the Church of England.
By the time that James II responded to the rebellion engineered by Parliament by abandoning the English throne in 1688, the American colonies on the mainland were well on their way to becoming the most denominationally diverse territory on earth. The Church of England; the Society of Friends (Quakers); and the Congregational, Roman Catholic, Presbyterian, and Baptist churches all had their spheres of influence. The colonists had lost forever the religious simplicity of the first colonies in Virginia and Bermuda.
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