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Overview
The analysis of Hooker's career is especially valuable for the information it provides concerning his close involvement with the major issues of the day: the conflict between Roger Williams and the Bay Colony; the antinomian controversy; the political and religious striving of the Massachusetts Bay Colony; and the forming of a truly American community. The author distinguishes several phases in Hooker's activities that correspond to his cultural and geographical milieu at different times. He discusses Hooker's education, first pastoral experience, and career.
Originally published in 1977.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691613277 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/08/2015 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #1603 |
| Pages: | 338 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Thomas Hooker, 1586-1647
By Frank Shuffelton
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1977 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05249-6
CHAPTER 1
Education and Conversion
When Queen Elizabeth I came to the English throne in 1558, she attempted a settlement of the religious controversies which had wracked that country ever since her father had repudiated the Pope's authority over the English Church. She supposedly acted for peace, unity, and the protestant religion — whatever that was — and placed the English Church half-way between Rome and Geneva, episcopal and traditional in form, Calvinist and reformed in doctrine. In the latter years of her reign, however, this characteristically Tudor compromise began to strain at the seams; the Roman Church still had great hopes of recovering England, and at the other extreme there were men who wished to press on with the work of the Reformation, still just begun in the established church, as they saw it. Elizabeth succeeded in maintaining peace for the whole of her long reign, but the unity she sought to maintain was only apparent, for beneath the surface, plots and counterplots to take over the English Church were being hatched.
English priests returned from the Continent and worked behind the front of conformity and obscurity to keep the Roman faith alive. In the year 1586, for example, "William Tomson, alias Blackeborne, made priest at Reims in France by the authoritie of the bishop of Rome and Richard Lea alias Long, made priest at Laon" were condemned for treason — their treason consisting principally in "remaining within this realme after the terms of fortie daies after the session of the last parlement." On the twentieth of April they were taken to Tyburn, hanged, and quartered. Hard times indeed for those who worked against the Queen's church-, especially so, some patriotic Englishmen such as Raphael Holinshed thought, since God was on the side of English Protestants. In July of the same year the Babington conspiracy was discovered, "wherein, as the turbulent spirited did what they could to proceed, so it pleased God the author of peace to intercept them in the plot of their mischeefous devise." When the people of London heard of the conspirators' discovery and capture, says Holinshed, "the present occasion forced such a sudden impression of joie, that they made the bels in steeples witnesses of their inward conceipt; ... some galled themselves with ringing, choosing rather to loose a little leather, yea a portion of their fat and flesh, than not ... to give a signe of their good affection." In September vast crowds turned out to watch fourteen of the conspirators be hanged, disemboweled, and quartered; the first seven of them had this grisly operation performed upon them after being pulled from the gallows still half-alive. The only results achieved by the plotters were to bring about the long-delayed trial and conviction of Mary Queen of Scots during the ensuing winter and to serve as terrible examples to any others who might choose to be "turbulent spirited."
While Elizabeth and her counselors were able to negate the Roman threat with occasional displays of vindictive justice and the enthusiastic cooperation of a large majority of the English people, the established church faced a threat from another direction, that vigorous left wing of the English Reformation which sought to further purify church discipline. During the short reign of Mary Tudor, many reformers were forced into exile on the Continent, and many of them brought back from Geneva and Strasbourg advanced ideas concerning the nature of a true, scripturally justified church. Beginning in the late 1560s, Thomas Cartwright, then Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, advocated presbyterian reform of the episcopal establishment, and after 1583 ever-increasing numbers of reforming ministers, now being derisively referred to as Puritans, surreptitiously passed around the Latin manuscript of The Book of Discipline, a presbyterian manual for a new church order. The Tudor Puritans prudently avoided such extravagances as plots to assassinate the Queen or to blow up the Parliament; their quarrel with the church was within the family, so to speak, and not involved with the treacherous game of international politics. While their more tactless and vociferous spokesmen might be barred from their pulpits, they had no martyrs. By the end of Elizabeth's reign, the establishment had seemingly reduced the cry for further church reformation to a low murmur of discontent and a sullen resistance to wearing surplices. As events would very soon show, however, the Puritan movement begun by Cartwright and the Marian exiles was by no means dead; more firmly entrenched than ever among the clergy, it had quietly changed tactics and begun to win the sympathies and loyalties of the laity by convincing them from the pulpit of the necessity of an inward, personal change in their spiritual lives as a prerequisite to any further action.
In the latter years of the sixteenth century the new generation being born would be the first to come to maturity after the external reformation of the English Church had been halted and the Puritan movement had turned its attention to the problems of the heart. Born Elizabethans, these men and women would come to discover themselves under the first two of the Stuart monarchs. In the 1630s they would seek to evade the heavy hand of Charles I and the corruptions of his imperfectly reformed church by taking both their vision of a more nearly perfect religious society and their memories of a happier England to a wilderness continent. Early in July of 1586 one of these men was born in Marfield, a small village in Leicestershire; when he came to manhood, he would become one of the most famous Puritan divines of his day and one of the chief architects of the New England experiment. Thomas Hooker was born the son of another Thomas Hooker, who was apparently an overseer of landed property belonging to the Digby family. Marfield was one of four tithings making up the parish of St. Peter's in Tilton; since the church records before 1610 are no longer extant, and lacking other records, we do not know the exact date of Hooker's birth and baptism, or even the Christian name of his mother. The Hookers appear to have been respected members of the middle class; funeral records in the Tilton church refer to both Hooker's father and his brother, John, as "Mr.," an appellative awarded only to men of some standing. In addition to his brother, Hooker had at least two sisters surviving to marriageable age, one of whom married a Mr. George Alcock and emigrated to New England in 1630. A cousin married "a revolutionist by the name of Pymm," indicating that the whole family was more or less Puritan in its sympathies.
Marfield was no more than a hamlet; a parliamentary return of 1563 listed only six households, out of a total of fifty-one in the whole parish. The focus of social life was a mile and a half away in the village of Tilton with its church atop a hill. A late nineteenth-century visitor admired "the picturesque old church of mottled gray on Tilton hill-top, compassed round by the dead of the different precincts of the parish; the wide prospect of alternating woodland and open fields and spire-surmounted hills toward every compass-point ... and the little Marfield hamlet embowered in trees down in the valley ... approached through rustic gates and stiles which the visitor opens or climbs as he descends through the sweet green fields." The pious and sober Hooker family walked every Sunday up the hill to Tilton, and the younger Hookers might well have made the trip again in the afternoon to be catechized by the rector. In the weekdays children might be sent on errands to the village, and almost certainly the Hooker sons went there to learn their ABC's. If there was no schoolmaster in Hooker's day, the rector of the church probably took it upon himself to prepare likely young sons of the parish for admission to a grammar school. By 1614 there was a regular charity school established in Tilton with its own master; this may have been organized too late to benefit Thomas and John Hooker, but it clearly reveals that some men in the village took a serious interest in the minds of the younger generation.
However else he spent his earliest years, Thomas Hooker by the age of eight or so learned to read English prose with facility and to handle pen and ink confidently, if not particularly handsomely. These were the usual requirements for admission to a grammar school, and in addition the infant scholar may have begun learning his Latin accidence. It seems reasonably certain that Thomas Hooker attended and graduated from the grammar school at Market Bosworth, a town nearly twenty-five miles west of his home village. This school had been endowed by Sir Wolstan Dixie, a wealthy merchant who owned property in the area; this school was founded in 1586, the supposed year of Hooker's birth and the year in which Sir Wolstan served as the Lord Mayor of London. Sir Wolstan also established two fellowships at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, which were restricted to his relatives or to graduates of Market Bosworth. Hooker later came to hold one of these, thus giving us our only evidence of where he prepared for the university.
At grammar school Hooker tackled first, appropriately enough, grammar, Latin grammar, learned by heart from the rules laid down in the small, crabbed type of Lily. Latin was the passport to learning, and as soon as practicable became the language of instruction in the grammar school; even conversation between students was to be carried on in Latin, and monitors from the upper form reported breaches of the rule to the master. The first Latin readings were probably from one of the popular editions of colloquies, perhaps Corderius or Castellion; the colloquies were collections of dialogues, usually concerned with student life, although Castellion's presented sacred history. After the colloquies, the student went on to read a goodly amount of the best classical authors: Cicero — especially Cicero — Terence, Virgil, Ovid, Sallust, and Horace were among the most popular. The nearly universal reliance upon the colloquies as a basic pedagogic tool reveals important assumptions behind the education which Hooker received. Learning was a dialectic process between reader and writer, teacher and student, knowledge and ignorance, and the young scholar was implicitly encouraged to conceive of his studies as a training in the art of communicating truth to men.
At about the time Hooker began his first Latin readings, he began developing his Latin prose style. First, perhaps, he might translate some brief text into English and then after a suitable period of time be given the translated version to set back into Latin in order to see how closely he could capture the style of the original. In later years he might be set to writing letters in imitation of Cicero or the composition of themes in accordance with Aphthonius or Erasmus's De Copia. The end of all this practice was to produce a student able to write readily and elegantly — elegance being exemplified by Cicero and other select Latin writers — and to organize his thoughts on any subject into the classical patterns defined by Quintilian and, again, Cicero. In addition to this concentrated dose of Latinity, the young Hooker probably would have been introduced in the latter part of his stay at Market Bosworth to Greek, perhaps Hebrew, and almost certainly to the first elements of logic and a bit of mathematics.
School was kept six days a week, beginning at six in the morning and continuing until five or six in the afternoon; there was an hour off in the morning for breakfast and perhaps three for dinner. Discipline was maintained with a firm hand; the traditional image of the schoolmaster always showed him with his birch and rod, and pictures of schoolrooms of the time usually featured these implements in prominent display. There were exceptions to this generalization, of course, but masters who couldn't control their students probably didn't last long, and it seems at least slightly significant that most educational theorists and reformers complained more of masters who used the rod too unsparingly than of those who used it too little. Hooker's master undoubtedly maintained an orderly classroom. Although Hooker always displayed a streak of stubbornness and had a temper he had to learn to control, the tone of his school life was probably not set by the rod and birch, but by the prayers which began and ended the day. Elizabethan grammar schools balanced their study of pagan rhetoricians with solid grounding in the truths of the Christian religion. The first-year students were allowed to relax from their assault upon Lily's Latin grammar by reading the New Testament and Psalms in English. All students were expected to attend Sunday services in the Market Bosworth church and to take careful notes on the sermon. In the succeeding week they were surely examined upon the sermon's content and its meaning, and part of the text might even be given to them in the regular course of their exercises for translation into Latin. The students took notes of the sermon in order to assist their memories, thus initiating what for some of them would become a lifelong practice. By the end of their school careers the students would be expected to "dite" the rector's sermon completely; when Hooker in his own turn entered the pulpit as a minister, he would hardly be surprised to see pious and studious members of his congregation writing down his words.
The rector in Hooker's time at Market Bosworth, the Reverend William Pelsant, was also one of Sir Wolstan Dixie's first appointees to the school's board of governors, and he might well have taken a close interest in the proceedings of the school. He perhaps visited the school occasionally in term and examined the scholars upon their progress into the mysteries of grammar and rhetoric and their knowledge of the catechism. The master may also have arranged a yearly exhibition of his students' skills in declamation and disputation which the rector surely attended in order to deliver his approbation or criticism. Given some indication of Sir Wolstan's puritanical leanings in his benefactions to Emmanuel, the most notable Puritan college at Cambridge, his decision to erect his school under the protective eye of the Reverend Mr. Pelsant seems to argue that the doctrine preached every Sunday in the Market Bosworth church was solidly protestant in the Calvinist direction and probably of a reforming tendency, but not likely very radical. Hooker boarded in Market Bosworth while the school was in session, and since the minister often took in students for supplemental income, he may very well have lived with Mr. Pelsant during term. If not, he would have lived in town with some family whose reputation and piety were approved by the master, the rector, and the other governors.
After seven or eight years of this regimen Hooker would have been about sixteen years old and fitted for the university. It is not entirely clear that he went to Cambridge immediately after he graduated from his grammar school, however, for he matriculated at Queen's College in 1604, when he would have been almost eighteen, and his residence was given as Birstall, Leicestershire. Hooker's putative age in 1604 unfortunately doesn't tell us much, since his birth year is uncertain, and we have no knowledge of his age when he began grammar school or whether his time there was interrupted in any way. On the other hand, his parents seem to have lived out their lives in Marfield, and we need some reason to explain his arrival at the university from Birstall, a village nearly ten miles from Marfield. A very possible explanation is that he was teaching school there; the older students in the grammar schools were often assigned to instruct the younger, and thus Hooker probably already had some experience in teaching. If the people of Birstall wanted a teacher of reading and writing for their children, they would probably have asked the master of some respected grammar school, like Market Bosworth, to recommend a promising scholar. Richard Mather, the first of the New England Mathers, became a schoolmaster in Lancashire at age seventeen and then went on to the university in a year or two. If Hooker did the same, his probable age upon entrance to the university would be explained; his status as sizar, a student who worked for his keep, might indicate that he would have wanted to set aside a bit of money before going up to Cambridge. Later on in his career Hooker definitely kept a school for a period, and he might well have gained his first experience as a teacher here in his home county.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Thomas Hooker, 1586-1647 by Frank Shuffelton. Copyright © 1977 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- Frontmatter, pg. i
- Contents, pg. vii
- Preface, pg. ix
- ONE. Education and Conversion, pg. 1
- TWO. Pastoral Beginnings, pg. 28
- THREE. The English Preaching Career, pg. 71
- FOUR. The Netherlands Experiment, pg. 121
- FIVE. Massachusetts, pg. 159
- SIX. Connecticut, pg. 197
- SEVEN. The New England Way, pg. 235
- EIGHT. Heritage, pg. 282
- BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY, pg. 309
- INDEX, pg. 319