8473 South Howell Avenue Oak Creek, WI 53154-0288 - National ...

Browne, wanted their traditional English service from the Book of Common Prayer3 .
But that was not to be. Endicott and the two ministers, the Revs. Samuel Skelton and
Francis Higginson, after conferring with the only Englishmen of any consequence
around at that time, the “first comers” (i.e., the Pilgrims), decided that the way they
worshiped in Plimoth, was the way they would do it in Naumkeag.
The Pilgrims were the remnants of the Leyden church of John Robinson, a
former devotee of Separatist Robert Browne. Over the course of forty years in
England and Holland, Robinson mellowed his once similar opinions, yet still
advocated a gathered covenanted church, separated from “the dross,” whose
members elected and ordained their own ministers.
Endicott agreed and called for “a solemne day of humiliation, for the choyce of a
pastor & teacher.” A minority of the settlement’s 200 residents met and chose the
Revs. Skelton and Higginson, by paper ballot, as pastor and teacher respectively;
the famous Salem Covenant of 1629 4 was drawn up about this same time. Thus a
fledgling Congregational church was born with drastic changes in polity and liturgy
from their mother church back home. The bishops and the Book of Common Prayer
were out, and the Browne brothers were sent back to England against their will.
The brothers petitioned the officers of the Massachusetts Bay Company back in
London to hear their case. They had put a lot of money into the Bay Company and
wanted redress for their losses. Their choice of representation was telling: William
Vassall, his brother Samuel, and William Pyncheon 5 . All three men would eventually
end up on the wrong side of the Puritan elite. At a London meeting on Sept. 29, 1629,
a meeting William Vassall did not attend, the private letters of the two brothers were
opened and it was decided that “none of the letters from Mr. Sam Browne shall be
delivered, but kept to be made use of against him as occasion shall be offered.” 6
Opening letters of potential troublemakers was common practice, first in London and
later in Boston. Leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Company wanted no negative press
about the new colony they were preparing to launch the next spring. Eleven ships had
already been purchased and decked out to carry 700 passengers to Salem. They especially
endicott and the two ministers … decided that the way they
worshiped in plimoth, was the way they would do it in naumkeag.
didn’t want the king thinking that Massachusetts was becoming a nest of Separatists.
William Vassall sailed to New England with his family April 7, 1630, perhaps on
the Arbella itself, arriving June 12 in Salem. Much to everyone’s horror they found
the fledgling colony under Endicott running out of food and negligent in planting
crops. With Salem ill-prepared to take care of itself, let alone 700 new settlers,
more than 100 destitute and starving Englishmen decided to return home with the
departing ships. On one of them—the Lyon, which Winthrop sent back to Bristol
for emergency supplies as early as July 23—sailed William Vassall and his family,
a most unusual turn of events for one who had pledged his wealth and support to
the company the summer before. 7
One wonders if it was the disease, the starvation, and the dilapidated village they found
there—in themselves plausible reasons for taking a young family back to England. But
gradually unfolding events suggest another motive, even more compelling.
The influential Rev. John Cotton (1585-1652),
who would soon emigrate to New England
himself, wrote from Lincolnshire to assure the
Rev. Samuel Skelton that the Church of England
was in fact a Reformed church and its members
worthy to receive the Lord's Supper.
The determined John Endicott sought to impose
a Separatist vision of church life on the new
Massachusetts Bay Colony.
3 Charles Andrews, The Colonial Period of American History Vol. 1 (Yale Univ. Press, 1934), 370.
4 “We Covenant with the Lord and one with an other; and doe bynd our selves in the presence of God, to walke together in all his waies, according as he is pleased
to reveale himself unto us in his Blessed word of truth.”
5 Alexander Young, ed., Chronicles of the First Planters of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay from 1623-1636 (Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1846
6 Ibid., 92.
7 “John Winthrop to J. Winthrop, Jr.,” Winthrop Papers Vol. 2 1623-1630, (Massachusetts Historical Society: Plimpton Press, 1931), 305.
Continued g
7
Courtesy of StanKlos.com