The History of New England

The Massachusetts Bay colony was founded by a group of Puritan settlers who arrived from England in 1630. The settlers, under the leadership of John Winthrop, went first to Salem, then to Charlestown, and finally settled at the mouth of the Charles River where the town of Boston was established.

The area where they settled was called New England. It had been claimed for the English crown by early English explorers like Sir Walter Raleigh. Raleigh's attempts to colonise America failed, but in 1607 Captain John Smith established a colony in Virginia (named after Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen). Other parts of the Americas, known as the New World, had been claimed by Holland, France and Spain.

To the south of the Massachusetts Bay colony was the English colony of New Plymouth, founded in 1620 by the Pilgrim Fathers who sailed there in the Mayflower. By 1638 there were also English colonies in Connecticut and New Haven. Further south the Dutch had a settlement called New Amsterdam. The English seized New Amsterdam from the Dutch in 1664 and renamed it New York. In 1685 all these colonies became part of the Dominion of New England by a decree from the very unpopular King James II of England (1685-1688).

By 1660 the original nine hundred settlers in Massachusetts Bay had been joined by twenty thousand more Puritans from England, and thousands more were to come. These Puritans were Congregationalists, Protestants who objected to the forms of organisation and worship being established by the Anglican church in England during the reigns of James I (1603-1625) and his son Charles I (1625-1649). In Massachusetts the Puritans founded a society based on their own religious ideas, although still owing allegiance to the English crown and subject to English laws.

After the execution of Charles I in 1649, the Puritan General, Oliver Cromwell, became Lord Protector of England. During the Protectorate (1653-1660) Cromwell tried to make peace between the contending Protestant factions and established the principle of religious tolerance in England. Charles I (1660-1685) took this toleration further by suspending, for a time, all penal laws against Catholics and Dissenters. Religious tolerance was not, however, a feature of Puritan society in Massachusetts.

Although subject to English law, the Massachusetts Bay colony was driven and constrained by the religious principles of Congregationalism. In principle each church and its congregation were supposed to be independent, but in fact they all adhered to the same strict code of belief and behaviour. Members, of the community who deviated from these norms of belief and behaviour were punished. Punishments were severe, as they were in England and the rest of Europe at the time: floggings were commonplace, and offenders could lose ears, noses or limbs.

Executions were public and could take the form of hanging, beheading or pressing to death. Outsiders who did not share their religious convictions were discouraged from entering the colony. About 1660, for example, a number of Quakers were hanged for returning to the colony after they had been deported. The persecution of the Quakers was halted by a letter from the king, Charles II. He ordered that "freedom and liberty of conscience" be permitted to all residents of the colony. But it was many years before such principles were apparent in the running of the colony.

The early history of Massachusetts is well documented. Among the early settlers in the colony were a group of educated gentry as well as educated church ministers, and Puritanism laid great stress on the value of literacy as all church members were expected to read the Bible. Harvard University, the oldest in America, was founded in 1636 at Cambridge, Massachusetts. Many administrative and church documents of the time still survive, together with court records and the personal journals, letters and diaries of individuals like John Winthrop and Cotton Mather. Among these documents are the actual transcripts of the witchcraft trials in Salem in 1692.