The English Origins of a Colonial American Controversy

Abstract

The debate unleashed by John Checkley over the historical nature of the Episcopal office was a lineal descendant of a similar dispute within the Church of England in the sixteenth century and the publications of John Cotton and Richard and Increase Mather in Massachusetts during the seventeenth century. It was a dispute marked by the division and dissension of the church’s reformed and traditional parties over the historic nature of the ministry and the office of bishop since at least the 1560s. The issue had been irregularly but vigorously revisited by Congregational and Anglican pamphleteers in the New England and Middle Colonies during the century before the outbreak of the American Revolution.1 Since the age of King Henry VIII’s reformation of the church in the sixteenth century, the institution had been embroiled in ecclesiastical and secular political conflicts. At stake were several fundamental matters: the nature of the Episcopal office; the structure and content of the Book of Common Prayer; whether a Catholic or Protestant monarch was to reign; and the power of the Crown and the constitutional role of Parliament. Not least important was the question as to who controlled the church’s purse, Parliament or the bishops through their Convocations. The question of the nature of episcopacy was shaped by the sixteenth-century debate, renewed in England during the 1630s and 1640s and recalled irregularly and vigorously by Anglican and non-Anglican colonial pamphleteers between 1720 and the early 1770s.