The Church of England Arrives in Boston

By Noah Good, Marketing Manager and History Program Educator

In 1630, John Winthrop led a group of Puritans from England to North America. Indigenous people had lived in the Shawmut Peninsula for millennia before the Puritans arrived and formed a settlement. Descendants of these Indigenous peoples still live in Massachusetts today.

The Puritans named their settlement on the Shawmut Peninsula “Boston” after the city of the same name in Lincolnshire, England. Boston began as a hiding place for Puritans who couldn’t worship freely back in England, but it soon blossomed into a center for Atlantic trade.

For fifty years, Boston’s Puritans more or less did what they wanted. This changed in the 1680s as the Crown grew increasingly frustrated with Massachusetts. The colony was making a good deal of money, and England wanted a cut. Massachusetts believed the laws of England didn’t apply to them. The Crown disagreed.

In 1684, King Charles II revoked the charter of Massachusetts, which was how the colony had been governing itself since 1630. Then King Charles II died and his brother King James II took the throne. King James II created the Dominion of New England – a superstate that stretched from New Jersey to Maine.

In May 1686, the Anglican minister Robert Ratcliffe arrived in Boston on an armed warship. At the time of his arrival, there were very few Anglicans in Boston. Ratcliffe was Boston’s first official Anglican minister.

Soon after his arrival, Ratcliffe led a worship service at Boston’s Town-House. The Puritan Samuel Sewall wrote in his diary that his son read to him Isaiah 26 and the Psalm 141, “both exceedingly suited to this day. Wherein there is to be Worship according to the Church of England as ‘tis call’d, in the Town-House, by Countenance of Authority.” Sewall’s references to Bible verses give us a sense of his perspective on the Anglican arrival. Isaiah 26 says, in part, “For he bringeth down them that dwell on high; the lofty city, he layeth it low; he layeth it low, even to the ground; he bringeth it even to the dust.” Psalm 141 says, “Incline not my heart to any evil thing, to practise wicked works with men that work iniquity: and let me not eat of their dainties.”[6] In short, Sewall was not a fan of Ratcliffe or the Anglican service.

Puritan Diarist, Samuel Sewall. John Smibert, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

A crowd came to watch the service. For many, this was their first time seeing an Anglican service. One witness wrote that Ratcliffe “read Common-Prayer in his Surplice” (the traditional Anglican vestment that had been the target of much Puritan ire) “which was so great a Novelty to the Bostonians, that he had a very large Audience”.

Puritan ministers denounced Boston’s new Anglican clergyman, calling him “Baal’s priest” and calling Anglican prayers “leeks, garlick and trash.” Influential Puritan minister Increase Mather compared an Anglican service, with its call and response prayers, to a tennis match.

On June 16, 1686, a month after Reverend Ratcliffe’s arrival, an Anglican congregation was officially formed in Boston.

​The Governor of the Dominion of New England, Edmund Andros, arrived in Boston in December 1686 with sixty soldiers. That Christmas, Andros attended Anglican services at the Town-House with “a Red-Coat going on his right hand and Capt. George on the left.”

In May, Governor Andros went to the Old South Meeting House and asked for the keys so that he could worship there. A group of men, Samuel Sewall included, showed Andros their records which proved “the Land and House is ours, and that we can't consent to part with it to such use.” A few days later, Andros went again to the Meeting House and made the sexton ring the bell, “though [he] had resolved to the contrary.”
 
Andros began using the Old South Meeting house for Anglican services, an arrangement that didn’t really work for anyone. Sometimes the Anglican’s morning service ran long, delaying the Puritan service and leaving a discontented crowd of Puritans waiting outside. The Puritans were so distressed by this disruption that they held a religious fast in hopes of divine intercession.

On June 15, 1686, the congregation of King’s Chapel was formally organized. But they still did not have a worship space of their own. In 1688, Boston’s Anglicans began fundraising. Samuel Sewall was asked twice if he would donate land for the chapel. He told them he “could not, would not, put Mr. Cotton's Land to such an use” and that he “would not set up that which the People of N. E. came over to avoid.” Increase Mather had much to say about the fundraising efforts: “Tis notorious, they went a begging to all the Congregations in the Town for Money, to Erect their Edifice, which they call a Church (tho' by the way, it was never Consecrated).” Despite his clear annoyance, Mather was still relieved that the Anglicans would no longer be sharing the space with Old South. He said it was “bonis avibus,” or under favorable omens, that they had decided to build a chapel.

In October 1688, the first King’s Chapel was finally built. The land was taken from the Puritan burying ground next door. In order to build it, several graves were disturbed, with bodies removed and reburied in a mass grave. Although this fact disturbs modern audiences today, the Puritans might not have minded that part very much. Samuel Sewall didn’t reference it in his diary, though in 1710 he recorded that when the town voted to use land from the burying ground to expand the church, the town-clerk opposed this “because the Graves of his Ancestors would be thereby hidden.” The Andros Tracts – a detailed account of every possible grievance against Andros – made no mention of it. This seeming apathy towards the disturbed graves would be in keeping with Puritan attitudes towards death and burial. Puritans didn’t see burying grounds as sacred spaces, and they weren’t especially precious about mortal remains.

​Increase Mather was certainly upset, however. When members of King’s Chapel grew frustrated that their neighbors, the school boys of Boston Latin School, kept breaking the church’s glass windows with stones and balls, Increase said the boys might have done it as revenge “for disturbing their Relations Graves, by the Foundation of that building.”

Boston Latin School, as depicted in a stained glass window at Yale. Nick Allen, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

While Anglicans and Puritans quarreled in Boston, tensions mounted over in England. King James II was Catholic. While distasteful to England’s Protestant majority, many predicted James’s reign to be uncomfortable but brief. He was fifty-one when he took the throne, and his wife Mary had given birth to several children who died in infancy and had endured multiple miscarriages and stillbirths. Surely there was no risk of a Catholic son succeeding James. Instead, James’ heir was his Protestant daughter Mary, now married to William of Orange. It came as a great shock, then, when the queen gave birth to a healthy baby boy in June 1688. Here was a male heir who would lead England into a hereditary Catholic monarchy. This fear–along with James’ unpopular policies–created a crisis. In the winter of 1688-89, King James II was ousted and replaced with William of Orange in what became known as the “Glorious Revolution.”
 
Boston had its own revolution a few months later. While Boston is now mostly known as the starting point of the American Revolution, this Glorious Revolution rippled through Boston just a few months after England. On April 18, 1689, “The Declaration Of the Gentlemen, Merchants and Inhabitants of Boston, and the Country Adjacent” was read aloud from the Boston Town-House. This declaration stated the reasons for revolt against Andros and the Dominion. Andros was arrested and imprisoned for almost a year before returning to England.

Although New England’s Glorious Revolution often gets overshadowed by its much larger cousin – the American Revolution – it marks an important political shift. How to define that shift, however, is an unsettled question. Stanwood argues, “New Englanders used innovative rhetoric to seek a restoration of the old charter government, thus dividing historians over whether the rebellion was the final chapter of Puritan rule or the first stirrings of secularization and modernization.” New England’s colonists saw the Glorious Revolution as an opportunity to renew their old self-government. But this was not to be.

​Winship explains:

​A convention of representatives of fifty-one Massachusetts towns met in Boston near the end of May 1689 and resolutely resolved in the old puritan spirit to venture their "lives and estates for the reviving and maintaining of" their "former liberties and enjoyments both civil and sacred." One faction at the convention managed to convince itself that the old charter was still legally in effect and that they could pick up where they had been rudely interrupted in 1686. But most of the magistrates the convention wanted to serve in the government refused to sign up until a grudgingly worded acknowledgment was made that their government's permanent form would be ultimately decided by the "higher powers in England.” … There was no going back; King William was in ultimate control of Massachusetts's destiny.

In just five years, life in Boston changed completely. Puritan self-rule was over. The very church the Puritans left England to escape arrived on their shores. Boston colonists got rid of Andros, but they couldn’t get rid of the Anglican church. 

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