New England in the Royalist Imagination, 1637–89

Abstract

Abstract This essay examines representations of New England puritanism in royalist print and manuscript polemic during the English Revolution of 1642–1660 and beyond. Royalist attitudes toward the North American godly colonies have been largely overlooked by modern scholars, who continue to privilege New England’s significance in intra-parliamentarian religious debates over its impact on the events of the civil war itself. As a result, they have neglected a substantial canon of hostile anti-puritan royalist literature that identified colonial puritanism, along with other malevolent international godly influences, as a horrifying example of the future awaiting old England if Charles I’s parliamentarian enemies were to triumph. As a pre-eminent puritan sanctuary from which some godly rebels had been recruited to perpetuate the civil war in Britain and to which domestic parliamentarians later allegedly intended to flee once their uprising had succeeded, New England thus occupied an important place in the royalist political imagination. Although royalist attitudes toward the American puritan colonies waxed and waned in significance during the revolutionary decades, and while New Englanders themselves may not have paid considerable attention to hostile royalist commentary, interested English readers and domestic parliamentarian polemicists alike paid a great deal of attention to the anti-colonial thrust of mid-century cavalier print. Moreover, certain aspects of royalist anti-New England rhetoric lived on to provide later anti-puritan commentators with a convenient explanation for the ongoing hostility of colonial puritans toward Stuart rule for decades following the Restoration.