The Plymouth Company and Massachusetts Bay Company (1622–1639): Establishing Theocratic Corporate Governance

Haig Z Smith

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-70131-4_3

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter examines the development of a different form of corporate religious governance in the Atlantic in the years after the Jamestown massacre. It focuses on the denominational identity of its members and how this influenced the direction and formation of a theocratic model of governance that the company would adopt. This chapter illustrates how the leaders of the Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay companies, such as William Bradford, John Endicott and John Winthrop, established authoritarian governments by manipulating charter privileges, forming a theocratic model of governance in New England. It examines how the leaders and members of the Plymouth Company and Massachusetts Bay Company, as corporate bodies, established and nurtured a distinct form of governmental identity. By tracing the development of the Massachusetts Bay Company’s congregational theocratic governance through works such as Bradford’s Of Plimoth Plantation, the Winthrop Papers, as well as the Records of the Town of Plymouth and the Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay New England, it shows how the joint stock corporation offered its members the legal and structural framework that would dogmatically police the religious behaviour of its members to secure and establish a godly republic.

Highlights

Established five years after the dissolution of the VC, the MBC took its charter and government to New England, and unlike its southern predecessor established a form of government almost entirely autonomous from England
The MBC’s members obtained the structural framework to legitimise and establish a form of theocratic governance that policed the religious behaviour of its personnel, securing the godly society that they had been unable to attain in England
As the MBC settled itself in New England, the purpose of its religious governance, unlike the VC, was to establish a form of godly theocratic governance, based on the Congregationalist principles of its members

Summary

Theocratic Corporate Governance

Two years after the massacre of 1622, James I revoked the VC’s charter and Virginia was placed under direct Crown rule. Made up of Nonconformist communities who had either fled from or were currently being subjected to the growing calls for uniformity in the established Church, the company developed a form of religious governance that mirrored their beliefs.[3] Through their corporate charter, the MBC’s members obtained the structural framework to legitimise and establish a form of theocratic governance that policed the religious behaviour of its personnel, securing the godly society that they had been unable to attain in England. The focus of this investigation is the corporate foundations and the charters of the PC and the MBC and how they provided the structural base for a community to develop a model of governance around the companies’ theocratic Congregationalist principles In establishing this structural base, those in the government that was settled in Massachusetts were perceived by many in England to have ‘turned their backs on the Church of England’, establishing a uniquely ‘New English’ form of religious governance.[7]. Whether English, European or Native American, all who fell within their geographic jurisdictions were to be governed, and judged, under the authority of the MBC

The Plymouth Company and the Foundations of Theocratic Governance

Chartering and Charter Rights

Massachusetts Bay Company as Trading Corporation

The Corporate Congregation and Foundations of Theocratic Governance

Corporate Historical

Findings

Conclusion