History of the First church in Hartford, 1633-1883.

Front matter

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

FIRST CHURCH OF HARTFORD.

Preface

The duty of preparing this History of the First Church in Hartford seemed to be laid upon the writer by the double consideration of the absence of any tolerably adequate narrative of the Church's story, and the anticipated celebration during his pastorate of the Two Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of its ecclesiastical organization.

To these incentives was added the further one that not only was the Church's story in large measure untold, but certain passages of that story had been to a considerable extent mistold.

In contemplating the undertaking, the writer was well aware that there are many men in Hartford better qualified by nature and by long familiarity with the place and its literature, to fulfill this service than himself, a comparative stranger. Things which to them are a part of family tradition or of early and scarce avoidable acquaintance, would come to him only by painstaking inquiry or accidental discovery, if indeed they came at all.

The writing of a History of this Church furthermore was an enterprise made the more difficult for any one, by the absence to a great degree, of those documentary memorials which every ecclesiastical establishment is supposed to keep of its own transactions.

The entire documentary records both of Church and Society for the first fifty-two years after the Church's origin have disappeared. The story of that whole period has to be gathered up so far as it can be gathered at all, from the collateral sources of Township and Colonial records, subsequently recorded narratives, with a few stray . ecclesiastical relics of a contemporaneous character.

In 1685, Rev. Timothy Woodbridge, the sixth minister of this Church, began entering in a little volume a meager account of his own ministerial acts, and to some extent the actions of the vi PREFACE.

Church; continuing it to his death in 1732. This account the Revs. Daniel Wadsworth and Edward Dorr followed by similar entries in the same volume, bringing the slender chronicle down to the year 1772. From that period and throughout the entire pastorate of Dr. Nathan Strong, and until the installation of Rev. Joel Hawes in 18 18, no Church record remains.

The Society records have been happily better preserved, from about 1685 onward. Though here, again, nothing corresponding to a Treasurer's account can be found for very considerable portions of the period. The complete and satisfactory telling of the History of the First Church in Hartford was therefore an impossibility, and even its partial narration more than ordinarily difficult.

Nevertheless the fact remained that the " Centennial Discourse" preached by Dr. Hawes in 1836, was the only attempt which had been made towards a consecutive account of the Church's history ; and the two and a half century annniversary of its birth was just at hand.

Whatever his deficiencies, therefore, the writer felt called on to do what he could to supply the lack of a better service. He was encouraged — especially respecting those passages of the history which have been referred to as in a measure hitherto mistold — by the availability for present use of certain papers unknown to Rev. Dr. Trumbull and other historians of Connecticut ecclesiastical affairs ; but whose recent discovery, and publication in 1870, make an explication of the period to which they refer, possible as it had not been before.

While engaged in the preparation of this volume and when it was in large measure 'ready for the press, the occurrence of the Celebration of the Anniversary to which reference has above been made, called on the writer for An Address for that occasion, the material for which was largely drawn from the manuscript of this History; the language being freely appropriated wherever the writer chose to use the phraseology he had already employed.

Acknowledgments for assistance in this undertaking are due to many; but especially to Dr. J. Hammond Trumbull and Chas. J. Hoadly, Esq., whose acquaintance with early Connecticut history — unequaled by that of any other two living men — has been with utmost kindness put at the writer's frequent service ; indica-

PREFACE. vii

tions of which fact will be found abundantly scattered through this volume.

Thanks are due also to the cooperate interest and aid of the present officers and members of the First Church and Society in carrying forward this work, and for their forbearance in tolerating the neglect on the writer's part of some pastoral service he would otherwise have performed. Written amid the pressure of constant parochial labor, and some family anxieties and bereavements, this History of the First Church, is now commended to the kindly consideration of all, and especially of those who know by some measure of experience, both the difficulty of such an endeavor and the liability to error in the' most conscientious performance of it.

Hartford, May, 1884.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

PAGE.

First Church of Hartford, - - Frontispiece.

St. Peter's Church, Tilton, - 20

Pastors' Monuments in Old Burying-Ground, - 272

Portrait of Dr. Nathan Strong, - - - 333

Portrait of Dr. Joel Hawes, - - - 367

Map of Hartford in 1640, ----- 88

Ground Plan of Meeting-house in 1809, - - 466-7

Contents

CHAPTER. PAGE.

I. 1554-1633. How this Church Came to Be. ... 1

Events of the year 1633. — Some antecedents of these events. — Separatist movements in England. — Puritanism under James and Laud. — The settlement at Plymouth. — The Dorchester Adventurers. — Planting of Salem, Charlestown, and Boston — Arrival of the Braintree company.

Chapter I How This Church Came To Be

The year 1633 was a memorable year for its occurrences alike in Old England and in New.

On the little strip of ground along the Atlantic border, where the New England settlements had a short time before got their first feeble footing, events took place which brought new encouragement to the heroic pioneers of civil and religious liberty who had left home to begin a new life on a new soil. Between February and October there had arrived at least nine vessels from England, with about seven hundred passengers and many cattle. In one of these vessels, the Griffin, after an eight weeks' voyage, came several men destined to take a large place in history. Among them was John Cotton, ordained a few days after teacher of the first church in Boston, having been aforetime a distinguished minister in old Boston, in Lincolnshire, and henceforth the chief expounder of religion and polity in the Massachusetts colony. Two others were Thomas Hooker and Samuel Stone, lately eminent Puritan Lecturers at Chelmsford and Towcester, respectively, and presently to join a waiting congregation at Newtown, as Pastor and Teacher of what is now known as the First Church of Christ in Hartford.

Another of the same company was John Haynes, " a gentleman of great estate," soon to be chosen governor of the colony of Massachusetts, but to be better known to us as one of the founders and long the governor of the colony of Connecticut. With these came about two hundred other passengers, many being " men of good estates." "They gat out of England with much difficulty, all places being belaid to have taken Mr. Cotton and Mr. Hooker, who had been long sought for to have been brought into the high commission " by command of bishop Laud. 1

This same year, too, a new settlement had been effected at Agawam, now Ipswich ; and a plot on the part of certain enemies of the colony at home, for the revocation of the charter, having failed, the outlook of the young settlement seemed bright enough to justify the "day of publique thanksgiveing in regard of the many and extraordinary mercyes," which was ordered to be observed "through the severall plantacons." 2 In this year also some of the Plymouth colony people made a settlement at Windsor, and the Dutch bought land and built a fort at what is now Hartford in Connecticut.

Across the water in old England, too, the year 1633 was one of important events having a direct bearing on the welfare of civil and religious liberty on both sides of the Atlantic.

It was in this year that Wentworth was sent lord deputy to Ireland to make the rule of the King there, as he wrote to Laud, " as absolute as any prince's in the world." 3 It was this year that Charles attempted his invasion of the liberties of the Kirk of Scotland under the wing of the royal

1 Winthrop's Jownal, i, 130.

2 Mass. Col. Records, i, 109.

3 Green's History of the English People, iii, 155.

1554-1633-] HOW IT CAME TO BE. 3

supremacy. This year saw also the proclamation of the King ordering every minister to read the declaration in favor of Sunday afternoon pastimes ; for refusing to read which " contradiction of the command of God" many hundred " ministers were driven from their livings, excommunicated, and forced to leave the kingdom." 4 This was the year, too, when the plan of the Puritans for buying up some of the presentations to livings, thereby to secure in some measure the preservation to themselves of Puritan ministers in cases where the congregation were of this way of belief, was roughly put an end to by the citation of the feoffees into the Star Chamber and the confiscation of the purchase money.

But above all else in its bearing on the hopes of those who had the welfare of the Puritan cause at heart, the chief event of 1633 was the advancement to the archbishopric of Canterbury of that most bitter and relentless enemy of further progress in the Reformation — Laud the bishop of London. In his narrower sphere as bishop of the metropolitan diocese, his influence had been potent for deprivation and misery to a multitude of the most godly men of the region in the vicinity of London, among whom were Cotton and Hooker who have been just mentioned. He was now to exercise his authority on a wider field, and with the recognition of the fact thus forced upon them, the thoughts of still more of the worried pastors and flocks of the mother country turned to the new world as their only hope.

These events of the year 1633, happening on either side of the Atlantic, were intimately connected with a long series of occurrences which had preceded them. To set them in their proper light it may be desirable to take a rapid glance

4 Neal's History of the Puritans, i, 313.

at a few of the more important incidents which may be accounted their natural progenitors.

The rupture with the Roman Pontiff which had been effected for England by Henry VIII, and the declaration of the independent authority of the English church, were not to any great extent a religious revival or a doctrinal reformation. The King assumed all ecclesiastical authority into his own control, confiscated the property of the monasteries, restricted the reading of the Bible in English, asserted his own supremacy over all the teaching of the clergy, and persecuted with relentless vigor all who questioned his claims. The annals of his reign are hallowed by the story of many a heroic effort for liberty and truth, and by many a painful sacrifice in their behalf ; but when the corpulent old monarch was hoisted by his " engine " up stairs for the last time, and the ulcer finished at once his life and his iron rule, the retrospect was any thing but a pleasing one to the lover of Christian light and liberty. The Papacy had been simply transferred from Rome to Hampton or Whitehall.

His son Edward VI, whose brief reign reaches only from 1547 to the middle of 1553, was educated under tutors in sympathy with the Reformation. And being for the most part under the guidance of Regents, governing in his name because of his minority, who desired a better settlement of the doctrines of the church and a reform of its laws, the Protestant movement made considerable advance. Still the cause was hampered by the imperfect sympathy of many of the bishops, who were not unwilling to preserve the condition of things established by the late King, and who had, despite the nominal separation from Rome, more or less manifest desire for a better understanding with the Papal See.

The refusal by bishop Hooper, in 1550, to be consecrated in the usual Romish vestments, marked the beginning of a controversy which was to give rise to the Separatist movement. But the revisal of the liturgy of the church undertaken in this reign gives what was, after all,, the true measure of the advance. This revisal amounted to little more than the translation of the Roman offices into English, and the omission of portions essentially offensive to Protestant ears, and the addition of responses to be voiced by the people, who had hitherto been simply spectators in public worship. The untimely death of Edward in the sixteenth year of his life and the seventh of his reign, put a period to the auspicious beginning which had been made.

With the succession of Mary, the Church of England again became Romanist. The reforms of her brother were overturned. The old laws against heresy were put in violent execution against all who advocated Reformation principles. Mary married Phillip II, and the English people were forced to see a Spaniard cooperating with an English Queen in restoring the practices of the Inquisition in the land. Bishops Hooper, Ridley, and Latimer, Mr. Rogers and many other learned and godly ministers, were burned at the stake. No less than two hundred and seventy-seven persons suffered death for their faith, among whom were five bishops, twenty-one ministers, fifty-five women, and four children. 5 These cruelties, together with minor persecutions innumerable, drove above eight hundred Protestant clergy and prominent laity into foreign lands. 6 Some of them went to Switzerland and some to Germany.

Among those who went to Germany the controversy first

5 Strype's Monuments, iii, 291, made prominent by Hooper's scruples about ecclesiastical vestments was emphasized, and resulted in the party of Separatism in English religious history. Some of the exiles wished to preserve the ritual of King Edward ; others desired to reform the polity and liturgy into accord with the Presbyterianism of the Genevan churches. Separatism is therefore commonly said to date from this year, 1554. The numbers, however, who desired separation from the Church of England were very few compared with those who only wanted a reform of the doctrine and practice of the church. And so when the accession of Elizabeth, in 1558, enabled the exiles to return to their home, the chief struggle of the reformers was a Puritan rather than a Separatist endeavor.

Some distinctly Separatist movements there were in England about 1566 ; 7 and more important ones afterward there will be occasion shortly to notice ; but for the most part the desire of the great body of the devout clergy was for purer worship and discipline in the church and not for separation from it. Hence, because about 1564 many of the clergy refused to comply with the order of the bishops, enforced by the Queen, to subscribe to the ritual and laws the Queen had determined should be established, they were stigmatized as Puritans. And as the Puritans generally agreed with Calvin in matters of faith, a Puritan came to stand in the public eye as a man of strict morals, Calvinist in doctrine, and a non-conformist to the ritual and discipline of the church, though not separating from the church itself.

The long and eventful reign of Elizabeth considered in its ecclesiastical aspect on the Protestant side of its affairs, was little but a protracted struggle between Puritanism, advocated by a growing body of devout ministers and laymen, and

1 554-I633-] HOW IT CAME TO BE. 7

aided by a considerable number of avowed Separatists on the one side, and Conformity backed by the government and the chief religious authorities of the land in church and state on the other. In this struggle the Queen showed herself the true daughter of her father. Her whole force of will and advantage of power were employed to crush out all opposition to the order of church administration she was pleased to prescribe. She established a new tribunal called the High Commission for the trial of all religious and ecclesiastical offences, not by a jury of twelve men hearing evidence according to the ordinary laws of legal procedure, but by a special board of commissioners of her own designation empowered to interrogate the accused at their pleasure. This High Commission proved a mighty instrument. Put into effective operation by archbishop Whitgift, in the single first year of his administration, 1584, two hundred and thirty-three ministers were suspended in six counties of the Province of Canterbury. 8

Under the vigorous procedures of this body no less than a fourth part of the clergy of England were, at one time and another, under suspension, and this not on account of any moral misbehavior or neglect of duty, but on account of conscientious scruples which forbade them to wear certain ecclesiastical vestments, for declining to baptize with the sign of the cross, disusing the ring in marriage, questioning the divine authority of the episcopate, and refusing to sign ecclesiastical rules imposed without authority of law.

To people of the present comfortable time some of these particulars of objection to the established system perhaps seem insignificant. To the actors on that stage they were immensely important. The cross in baptism was the representative symbol of a whole world of superstitious ceremonies of which the Roman church has prescribed the observance. The surplice was the badge of that hierarchical separation of ministry and people which long ages of oppression had made so offensive and which the new-awakened sense of the brotherhood of all believers in Christ so discountenanced. The ring in marriage was the token of the Papal doctrine which made matrimony a Christian sacrament under the sole authority of the church. The bowing at the name of Jesus was a seeming impeachment of the reverence due equally to the Father and the Spirit. The observance of Saints' days reminded of ecclesiastical impositions which burdened life with their restrictions and laid a yoke on conscience too hard to bear. The rule of bishops associated with temporal dignities and authority, was a constant assertion of a claim to a supremacy of one soul over many souls which came not from the word of God, but from the devices of man. The objection was based on no mere whimsy of sentiment. As in a time of national struggle a flag may be the symbol of principles reaching into the deepest center of a people's life, and of memories which volumes would be all too scant to unfold, so in the place where the Puritan of Elizabeth's day stood, the ring, the cross, the surplice were signs of things of the utmost concern.

And when it is remembered that these sentences of deprivation and silence were directed, in almost all cases, against the most learned as well as most devout of the clergy of a church, in which it is estimated that at this time not one in six was capable of composing a sermon, some suggestion may be had of the wrong done, not alone to religion but to intelligence, by the rigorous demand of Elizabethan conformity.

It has been said that the great body of the clergy who

1554-1633-] HOW IT CAME TO BE. g

sympathized with reform in church affairs were Puritan rather than Separatist. This is undoubtedly true; but there were all along in the latter portions of this reign the earnest advocates of such a reform in church polity as meant only separation. In 1572, Thomas Cartwright, Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, had preached practical Presbyterianism 3 and had secured the assent of many of the neighboring clergy. In 1580, Robert Browne became an object of governmental disquietude for his public preaching of separation from the church of England as the only hope of reform. He had a long and arduous struggle in the setting forth of his views, having been, as he tells us, in the process committed " to thirty-two prisons, in some of which he could not see his hand at noon-day." He was obliged at length to exile himself with some of his followers to Middleburg, in the Netherlands, where he established a congregation. It was from this pioneer in Independency that the advocates of separation derived their nickname of Brownists. But however stigmatized or persecuted, Brownism grew and had its martyrs. In 1583, John Copping and Elias Thacker were executed for " dispersinge of Browne's bookes." John Greenwood and Henry Barrowe were hanged in 1593, for publishing opinions of the same kind. John Penry and William Dennis suffered the same fate. Nevertheless the same year which saw the execution of Greenwood and Barrowe, Sir Walter Raleigh said in the House of Commons, " I am afraid there is near twenty thousand Brownists in England." So strenuous, however, were the measures employed for their repression that at a later period of the Queen's reign Lord Bacon was enabled to write, " as for those we call Brownists, they are now, thank God, by the good remedies which have been used, suppressed, and worn out; so that there is

I0 THE FIRST CHURCH IN HARTFORD. [i 554-1633.

scarce any news of them." 9 Some of their principal ministers withdrew to Holland and established there religious bodies, of which more will be heard hereafter.

It was fondly hoped by those who had suffered under the repressive" administration of Elizabeth, that the accession of James, in 1603, would bring some relief. James had been educated a Presbyterian. He had written Calvinistic commentaries on the Scriptures. He had been the ostentatious champion of anti-prelatical views of the continental churches. He was a man of scholarship and was hoped to be a man of Puritan convictions.

But the hopes awakened were doomed to early disappointment. James was met on his journey up to London by a deputation bearing what is called the Millenary 10 Petition, praying "as faithful ministers of Christ and loyal subjects to his Majesty" for the redress of some abuses.

The reforms were substantially those to which reference has before been made as those which the Puritans common^ desired.

As a response to this petition the King appointed a meeting at Hampton Court, ostensibly to confer with the representatives of the petitioners concerning the proposed reforms. The Conference was, however, only a farce. Nine bishops of the church and as many more of its higher dignitaries represented the old order of things, and, as it proved, represented also the King. For the Puritans only four ministers were allowed to appear. They were Dr. Raynolds, Dr. Sparks, Mr. Knewstubs, and Mr. Chaderton ; of the latter of which reverend gentlemen there will be occasion to speak again. The Conference lasted nominally

9 Green, iii, 34.

10 From the popularly supposed thousand of its signatures. There were in fact over eight hundred.

1554-1633-] HOW IT CAME TO BE. H

three days. But it was throughout little more than a series of taunting enquiries and offensive lectures addressed to the Puritan representatives by the church party and the King. James interrupted them with the command to "awaie with their snyvelings," and ended with the declaration, "if this is all your party have to say, I will make them conform or I will harry them out of this land, or worse."

The Puritans saw they had nothing to hope for from the King. He put himself into the hands of the ecclesiastics ; he practically renounced the Calvinistic sympathies which he had cherished in Scotland, and became identified with those who advocated Arminianism in doctrine and High Churchism in polity. The vain and obstinate prince, with considerable learning and shrewdness, was wholly unable to comprehend the temper of the English people over whom he was to rule. " Do I mak the judges ? Do I mak the bishops ? " was his childish exclamation of satisfaction as the prerogatives of his new empire were disclosed to him, "then, God's wauns, I mak what likes me, law and gospel." He more and more withdrew from the wisest advisors of his government, and put successive favorites like Carr and Villiers in their places.

The court of the Presbyterian Scotsman became notorious for its profligacy. Peerages were sold to meet the need of an exchequer which an alienated house of Commons refused to replenish. Negotiations for a marriage of the Crown Prince were opened with the king of Spain. James dissolved his last Parliament in 162 1, tearing from the journals of the house with his own hands the assertion of the " libererties of the subjects of England," which were inscribed on the pages, exclaiming : " I will govern according to the common weal, but not according to the common will." He

I2 THE FIRST CHURCH IN HARTFORD. [i 554-1633.

imprisoned ten excellent ministers who dared to present a moderate petition for church reforms ; such petition being declared to be " fineable at discretion, and very near to treason and felony."

Naturally discouraged by such a condition of affairs, sometime in 1608, the Separatist congregation at Scrooby, of which Richard Clifton was pastor, and John Robinson teacher, and William Brewster ruling elder, and William Bradford the most important lay member, succeeded in leaving England and took up a brief residence at Amsterdam, from which place they removed to Leyden. "

From this Leyden church in 1620, a portion of the number impelled by the limitations of their condition in a foreign country and among people who spoke a different language, voyaged to America, landing on December 21st, at Plymouth, and setting up on the barren shore of this vast continent, the first New England church of God. Robinson did not come with them. He watched over those who remained on the soil of Holland and sent his counsels to those who departed to the new world till 1625, when he died.

Meanwhile the Puritan struggle went on in England with small prospect of cheer. Charles I, succeeded his father in the same year Robinson died, 1625 ; a man of sweeter nature than James, but weak, bigoted, and insincere. He was a Stuart, and he married a beautiful but imperious and fanatical Catholic, Henrietta of France. The country was for generations to rue that unfortunate alliance.

He summoned his first Parliament in 1625, but being annoyed by the caution of the Commons in voting supplies before they had some security for the better administration of government, he dissolved it even before his coronation.

11 Dexter's Congregationalism in Literature^ p. 380.

1554-1633-] HOW IT CAME TO BE. i$

Forced by the exigencies of his treasury to call another in 1626, he imprisoned Sir John Eliot who had spoken against Villiers,' the infamous favorite whom Charles had made duke of Buckingham, and dissolved Parliament again. He undertook to avoid the necessity of convening the obnoxious legislators by levying forced loans ; but overwhelmed by debt he was obliged, in 1628, to issue summons for Parliament to meet again.

When this Parliament assembled, the first question called up was that of religion. Memorable in all his history is the address of Sir John Eliot in declaring the primal place in all public as well as private affairs of religious truth and behavior. The Commons, in sympathy with the eloquent orator, refused to consider any question — not even of tonnage and poundage, the sore questions of the exchequer — till the religious grievance was discussed. The determination was met by dissolution once more. Henceforth for eleven years no Parliament was to assemble. The government of England was to be absolute monarchy. The chief leader of the opposition, Eliot, was imprisoned and kept incarcerated till, three years after, he died. Charles refused the request of his relatives to convey his relics to the family burial place. He lies, one of the martyrs for liberty, in the grave-yard of the Tower.

William Laud, bishop of London, a sincere, but a narrowminded and truculent ecclesiastic, was the King's chief advisor in religious affairs. He was a bitter hater of popular rights, and an almost undisguised lover of Papistic doctrines and ceremonies. The affairs of the High Commission court were entrusted to his hands, and his use of these powers was one of the things against which Parliament had complained to the King as "discouraging orthodox and painful ministers,

I4 THE FIRST CHURCH IN HARTFORD. [i 554-1633.

though conformable and peaceable in their behaviors." No bar now stood in the way of Laud's vigorous malignity. He harried the Puritan ministers of the diocese — the largest and most distinguished in the nation — without rest and without mercy. Thomas Shepard, afterward the saintly pastor at Cambridge in America, and son-in-law to Thomas Hooker, Pastor of the First Church in Hartford, gives a graphic account of his own citation before Laud in 1630. He says, 12 in speaking to him, Laud "looked as though blood would have gushed out of his face, and he did shake as if he had been haunted by an ague fit. . . . He fell then to threaten me, and withal to bitter railing, calling me all to naught, saying, 'You prating coxcomb, do you think all learning is in your brain? I charge you that you neither preach, read, marry, bury, or exercise any ministerial function in any part of my diocese ; for, if you do, I'll be upon your back, and follow you wherever you go, in any part of the kingdom, and so everlastingly disenable you.' "