The Book of Books. Melvyn Bragg
Читать онлайн книгу.
know them to be sharp and violent, and subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search an unknown coast. Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate place, full of wild beasts and wild men – and what multitudes there might be of them, they knew not.’
By the end of that first winter, half of them had died.
They were woefully unprepared for the task of settlement. The author Bill Bryson has written: ‘You couldn’t have had a more helpless group of people to start a new society. They brought all the wrong stuff, they didn’t really bring people who were expert in agriculture or fishing. They were coming with a lot of faith and not a great deal of preparation.’ These people had travelled before – to the Netherlands where they had sought refuge for their godly task. But in that country there was a language and an economy with which they were familiar.
They saw alien peoples and the uncultivated wilderness. Yet it was their destination and they sturdily called it ‘New England’. Out of this desert walked their saviour. He was an Indian, Tisquantum, nicknamed Squanto. The settlers would have had every justification for adding his appearance to the calendar of miracles. His knowledge, intelligence and kindness got them through that winter and beyond.
Squanto had been kidnapped by English sailors fifteen years before and taken to London where he was trained to be a guide and an interpreter for the fishermen who regularly travelled the 3,000 miles across the North Atlantic to bring back rich hauls from the teeming, scarcely harvested seas of the North Atlantic and Cape Cod. Squanto escaped, and trekked back to his tribe. He found it all but wiped out by one of the European diseases that were to bring successive plagues to the Native Americans. He travelled on and you might feel justified in saying, ‘God alone knows how,’ he ended up next to the same rock as the helpless colonists from Devon. As Bill Bryson notes: ‘He taught them not only which things would grow but also how to fertilise corn seed by adding little pieces of fish – the fish would rot and actually fertilise the seed – and he taught them how to eat all kinds of things from the sea.’
He spoke English and helped the settlers to reach a balance of accommodation with the tribes whose lands they had moved in on. Some of the settlers thought it beyond mere good fortune and saw it as providence. This was the Promised Land and God had held out His hand to them.
Charles I had succeeded his father, James, in 1625. His increasing encouragement of Catholic practices drove out more and more colonists and Separatists. The King badly underestimated the historical and the visceral fear of Roman Catholics. The Pope was considered to be the literal Antichrist: his Church the Empire of Evil, his mission satanic. By 1640, scores of ships had brought over a community of about 25,000 in and around new Plymouth. They came largely from the east of England – especially Lincolnshire, Essex, Kent and London – and the Midlands, particularly Nottinghamshire. Overwhelmingly, they came to stay and they dug in.
They were proud to be English. The place names alone show that: a small selection includes Cambridge, Ipswich, Norwich, Boston, Hull, Bedford, Falmouth and Plymouth, of course. This was evidence of homesickness perhaps, but also a determination to keep the connection and hold faith with the faith of those they had left behind. It was a new baptism, but also an assertion of their Englishness. There were many who came for reasons other than a search for a place in which to plant a purer Puritan faith. But for many generations it was the religious self-exiles who dominated. By the time the make-up of the population of the New World had grown and changed and its history been forged in godliness, slaughter, injustice and risk, it was these founding Puritans and Separatists who had put down their mark. Their covenant with each other through their faith in the teaching and in the language of the Bible had made its harsh Protestant character the first draft of the new America.
There was something else going on, more profound and, I think, difficult to grasp in our age. There grew with increasing force in seventeenth-century England, among the Puritans, the belief, frightening to these faith-filled souls, that ‘God was leaving England’.
In this, as in so much about the seventeenth century, I am indebted to Christopher Hill. Here is a quotation with which he opens the chapter called ‘God Is Leaving England’, in his book The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution. He begins with a reference, one of many, taken from the Old Testament.
‘The Lord hath a controversy with the inhabitants of the land, because there is no truth, nor mercy, nor knowledge of God in the land.’ The land referred to was now thought to be England. The fear was growing that the threat of Catholicism and the Antichrist was not being countered with sufficient rigour. Charles’s court flirted with Catholicism and it was becoming dangerously drawn back into its orbit.
In Europe the Thirty Years War between Protestants and Catholics was swinging perilously and savagely against the Protestants. England refused to get involved. Just as Israel had faced the larger powers of Egypt and Babylon, so England now faced the far greater powers of France and Spain. The Puritans thought that their country was not alive to the danger. Why did King Charles not take up arms against the Catholics? God would not stay with people who did not deserve Him.
In 1622, John Brinsley, in his influential The Third Part of the True Watch, wrote: ‘The withdrawing of the Lord’s precious presence from his church is both an evident sign of his displeasure and a manifest threatening of his departure.’ England needed to repent its sins. Preacher after preacher called out, but in vain. A verse of one new hymn ran:
Preserve this hopeless place
And our disturbed state
From those that have more wit than grace
And present counsels hate.
Less than a decade later, in 1631, Thomas Hooker, in a sermon called ‘The Danger of Desertion’, left no one in any doubt. ‘As sure as God is God, God is going from England . . . Stop him at the town’s end and let not thy God depart . . . God makes account that New England still be a refuge . . . a rock and a shelter for his righteous ones to run to.’
Which they did; the hundreds turned into thousands. There were those who remained to continue the fight in the Puritan cause in the Civil War and to see their triumphant victory and the Protestant ‘Commonwealth’ under Oliver Cromwell. This seemed to promise to reunite New and Old England for ever. But before that, the decisive transatlantic shift, the flight which was to create the character of America, had been made. The dreadful warning, that ‘God is leaving England’, had been heeded and taken literally. And as a consequence the New World was founded on the rock of a tough, Bible-bound, deep-thinking Protestantism.
There had been expeditions and attempted settlements in America before the Pilgrim Fathers – in Virginia, for instance, under Walter Raleigh in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. There was Jamestown, established in 1607. This was Anglican, rather middle class and more easy-going than those fanatically driven communities further north. Not that the English gentry avoided going to the north. The immigrants of the 1630s were a wide social mix, but it was the Puritans who were dominant for a sealing length of time. ‘From the beginning,’ as Diarmaid MacCulloch the distinguished theological historian has written, ‘they were a ‘Commonwealth’, whose government lay in the hands of godly adult males who were the investors and the colonists.’ Most of them were Puritans: the Separatists – extreme Puritans – were a minority, but, in the early days, disproportionately influential.
The first Governor of Massachusetts, John Winthrop, like his Puritan contemporary Oliver Cromwell, was an East Anglian gentleman. One of the most striking things these Puritans did was to set up a university college, Harvard, in a town they named Cambridge. It was for the training of new clergy. In 1650 Massachusetts had one minister for every 415 persons. In Virginia it was one for 3,239. And by law every householder in Massachusetts had to pay a tax for the church or meeting house and by law go there for two hours twice on Sundays and for a two-hour lecture in the week.
This and their devotion to the daily study and reading of the Bible and other religious works made them, MacCulloch again, ‘possibly the most literate society then existing in the world’. Almost every Puritan town had a school. What bound them was the central notion of ‘the covenant’ they had