A short history of the Hootenanny Mass & other absurdities... part 12

Letter to Harold “Hoot” and Annie Gibson cont. part 12

THE MAYFLOWER GOES TO SEED; THE PILGRIMS AND THEIR DESCENDANTS

In our last exciting episode, we read how around 50 English separatists established the Plymouth plantation in 1620. They were Calvinist and, in the religious sense, non-conformists for whom the Church of England was still too “popish” and for whom Holland was just too, well, Dutch. We know them as “the Pilgrims”. They were soon followed by the Puritans (also Calvinists, but for whom the Church of England wasn’t quite that awful) They founded places like Boston in order to escape that religious popishness and frippery back in England. And they just kept coming.

In 1630, the Puritan John Winthrop received a charter from the King to found the Massachusetts Bay Colony of which he would be governor. He led a fleet of eleven ships carrying 700 English Puritans. That was the beginning of the Great Migration in which 20,000 colonists came to New England between 1630 to 1640. The Puritans found themselves increasingly alienated from the Church of England and soon joined forces with the separatist pilgrims. In 1648, at the request of the Massachusetts General Court, a synod of ministers from Massachusetts and Connecticut, met to draw up an agreement called the Cambridge Platform defining Puritan Congregationalism and in effect, the government of New England. The agreement defines the church as “a company of saints by calling, united into one body by a holy covenant, for the public worship of God, and the mutual edification of one another in the fellowship of the Lord Jesus.” No King, no Pope, no Bishops no Presbyters. The church consisted of the congregation, governing itself without reference to external authority. Thus, the Puritan settlers established a sort of unified theocratic political system which went on to give us the Salem witch trials. The birth of the United States could be as well defined by this document as by the Declaration of Independence.

Back in England, the English were tired of government by Presbyterians and, and wishing once again to be merry, restored the Stuarts as kings in 1660. The Stuarts, in turn, published the “Act of Uniformity” (1662),which said all ministers had to be ordained by the Church of England, and swear an oath to abide by its rules. In other words, conform or get out. More than 2000 Puritans ministers refused to swear and were tossed out of their jobs in an event called the Great Ejection. And so, they just kept coming to New England.

They came to these fair shores for religious freedom and the right to squash anyone they disagreed with. Dissenters likes Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams founded Rhode Island when they were banished from Massachusetts for heresy. In 1636, some Puritans went south and settled Connecticut with its rich soil. For some reason this worried the local Americans(by “Americans” I mean the original indigenous population) who decided that enough was enough. They tried to regain their land and independence in the Pequot War (1634-38) and in King Philip's War (1675-76). (King Philip, being another name for Metacom, chief of the Wampanoags.) The Wampanoags and the Pequots got clobbered and the era of the Native Americans was over. The Pilgrims whom they had sustained in those first hard winters had taken the natives’ land and sold some of them into slavery in Bermuda, some fled to other tribes beyond the reach of the English. Others were confined to small settlements as they would be until our present times, until they figured out how to get back what the palefaces had stolen by inviting us to their gambling casinos and selling us tax-free cigarettes.

The Americans didn’t entirely give up. A little less than a century later they allied themselves with the Catholic French in order to stem the unending flow of English colonists at the Appalachians. This was called the French and Indian war (French and Indians against the English, 1754-1763), which the case can be made, George Washington started by shooting the French ambassador at Fort Dusquesne, now known as Pittsburgh. This of course led to the American Revolution which led in turn to us. It also led to Cajun cuisine and Zydeko, because Massachusetts Governor William Shirley deported the French Catholic Acadians from Nova Scotia to New Orleans as part of the war. The war cost money and the British thought that the New Englanders should help pay for it. After all, the war had been fought to protect New England from its former owners, the Indians. The descendants of the Puritans refused to pay and so Massachusetts became “Cradle of Liberty”. New England had always disliked the Church of England and its head, the king, and so what had been religious separatism increasingly became just separatism. It is to be remembered that people like Sam Adams and his cousin John Adams and their friend John Hancock and that crowd, were the descendants of the Puritans.

You would be amazed at who is descended from the Puritans. Presidents John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Zachary Taylor, Ulysses S. Grant, James A. Garfield, Franklin D. Roosevelt, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush are all descended from the 50 Mayflower survivors. That’s just the 50 on the Mayflower. By 1640 there were at least 20,000 more Puritans in New England. Millions of modern day Americans are descended from the Puritans, among them President Barak Obama. Barack Obama, a Pilgrim? I’m not making this up. Barack Obama is a 13th-generation descendant of Thomas Blossom, one of the Plymouth colony’s earliest settlers, and is a cousin of the Bushes. The wonder of it all! These are only some of the physical descendants of the pilgrims. The Puritan founders of New England have innumerably more moral, philosophical theological descendants.

We have to remember that there were two principal English colonies in the Americas. Now you know more about the Plymouth Plantation than you ever wanted to. There is also Jamestown in Virginia named in honor of King James I. It was in effect, the Church of England’s colony. The Puritans of the north were the fathers of the American revolution, of the abolition movement, of the industrial revolution and on and on. The Jamestown settlers were the founders of the planter aristocracy of the south. These two opposing philosophies met head on in the English Civil War, and once again in the American Civil War. For the southern Anglicans, the Book of Common Prayer was normative. It was offensive to northern Puritans. The Book of Common Prayer is filled with vestiges of the Catholic past. In particular it contains prayers for the king, to ask God “to be his defender and keeper, giving him victory over all his enemies.” In the American revolution, this amounted to treason, and so Anglicans in America became Episcopalian, and ultimately the Puritanism of New England triumphed over the Anglicanism of Virginia.

Well, again you may ask, what has this to do with the Hootenanny Mass? When Governor John Winthrop was on his way to America with his flotilla of 11 ships crammed with Puritans among whom were the ancestors of almost everyone important in America today including Thomas Blossom, ancestor of Barak Hussein Obama, while still on board, Governor Winthrop delivered a sermon entitled, “A Model of Christian Charity” to his fellow Puritans. In this address he called their new colony “a city upon a hill” a phrase taken from Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. In Matthew 5:14, he says, “You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden.” Perhaps this is the heart of the American Puritan ethos. It is the first clear enunciation and perhaps the root of American exceptionalism, the Puritan belief that the United States is more favored by God than other nations. The Spanish colonies did not think of themselves as exceptional. They were part of a universal church and looked back to Spain. The Virginia colonists looked back to England to which they referred lovingly as the mother country. The Puritans called themselves the godly and believed that God had given them this land by destroying its native inhabitants by plague and war, and they compared themselves to the Israelites and their promised land, cleared of its Canaanite inhabitants. They were special. They were the city on a hill, created to teach the rest of the world how to do it right.

On January 9, 1961, another Bostonian, John F. Kennedy spoke to the General Court of Massachusetts, quoting Winthrop’s sermon. “I have been guided by the standard John Winthrop set before his shipmates on the flagship Arbella three hundred and thirty-one years ago, as they, too, faced the task of building a new government on a perilous frontier.” John Kennedy, the first Catholic President of the United States who said during his campaign that his Catholicism would not impinge on his presidency. Now do you see how the Puritan forbears are the fathers of the Hootenanny Mass, and of so much modern American “Catholicism"?

Next week: BOSTON BAKED CATHOLICS or IRISH NEED NOT APPLY.

A short history of the Hootenanny Mass & other absurdities... part 11

Letter to Harold “Hoot” and Annie Gibson cont. part 11

THERE GOES THE NEIGHBORHOOD. A PROBLEM WITH UNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRANTS

Let us pause to look at some dates, not the edible kind. Queen Elizabeth I (Tudor) ruled England from 1558 to1603. King James ruled England from 1603 to 1625 and his son, Charles Stuart, a.k.a. King Charles I of England, ruled from 1625 to 1649. So, you have 100 years of the Church of England and Tudors/Stuarts, and what a century it was!

Elizabeth wanted a church that looked Catholic but thought Protestant, as had her father, Henry, before her. Her cousins the Stuarts thought that was just fine. Beginning in 1559, all English citizens were required to attend Church of England services on Sundays and holy days. One was fined for each service missed. Those conducting unauthorized services were fined more heavily, imprisoned and occasionally executed for sedition.

Calvinists and Catholics were not happy with the Elizabethan compromise. For Catholics it was too Protestant. For Calvinists it was too Catholic, or as they would say “popish.” (I’ve always thought that was a swell word.) Calvinists were not one cohesive group. There was a spectrum of Calvinist opinion. Some Puritans could put up with Anglican worship, but others, called Separatists or non-conformists, would have none of it. An Anglican Archbishop, Matthew Hutton, could not abide Calvin’s separatist followers, but showed some sympathy for Puritans expressed in a letter to Robert Cecil, Secretary of State to James I in 1604:

“The Puritans, whose phantasticall zeale I mislike, though they differ in Ceremonies and accidentes, yet they agree with us in substance of religion, and I thinke all or the moste parte of them love his Majestie, and the presente state, and I hope will yield to conformitie. But the Papistes are opposite and contrarie in very many substantiall pointes of religion, and cannot but wishe the Popes authoritie and popish religion to be established.” (Apparently people in merrye olde England had an odd way of spelling.)

A particular group of radical Separatists in the town of Scrooby (name not made up) in Nottinghamshire, England, were persecuted by King James’ government. In 1607 Tobias Matthew, Archbishop of York, raided homes and imprisoned several members of the Separatist Puritan congregation, so they abandoned England with its established church that smacked of popery, with its priests and bishops and vestments and superstitious rituals that looked suspiciously like Mass. They fled to Holland, where they found themselves second class citizens even among their Dutch Calvinist co-religionists. They were unable to speak the language and could barely get work and, heaven forfend, their children were becoming just too Dutch! So it was off to the wilderness of America to invent Thanksgiving and televised football.

In 1620, the Scrooby Separatists, later called Pilgrims by William Bradford, arrived in what is now Massachusetts aboard the Mayflower. Upon landing they found some mounds that turned out to be native graves which they promptly robbed. Taking some of the provisions for the dead which had been placed in the graves, they also found an iron kettle in which they placed some of the corn they found and re-buried the rest to use later as seed corn. William Bradford wrote: “They also found two of the Indian's houses covered with mats, and some of their implements in them; but the people had run away and could not be seen. They also found more corn, and beans of various colors. These they brought away, intending to give them full satisfaction (repayment) when they should meet with any of them, - as about six months afterwards they did.”

So began the story of the first Thanksgiving: grave robbing and home invasion. It all sounds a little like a Calvinist version of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. In a short time most of the settlers had become ill, and ridden with scurvy. It was December and there had already been snow. As they explored the area, they saw their first native people, who fled from them. It was not the first time that the locals had met the English. The English had already been there for fishing and trade even before Mayflower. One local tribe, the Pokanoket really disliked the English after a bunch of them had been rounded up, taken on board ship and shot.

Captain Thomas Hunt, a slave hunter also came calling and captured a couple dozen natives to sell as slaves back home in Europe. One of them was the famous Squanto. Admittedly, he sold his captives in Catholic Spain, but when some Franciscan friars found out what he was up to, they freed the Americans, and taught them Christianity. Squanto convinced the friars to let him try to return home. He made his way to London, worked on his English, and managed to sail back home. There he found his entire village dead of European diseases and pilgrims living on his family farm. He spoke English well and was able to mediate between native and thus insured the colonists’ survival. The colonists returned the favor by almost completely wiping out the native population who, as the years went by, had the temerity to fight for the land that they had once owned.

Let us briefly return to merrye olde England, which was becoming less and less merrye. King James was not the Separatists’ idea of a Godly sovereign and so more of them decided to move to America. In 1621, a second ship carrying more colonists came from England, boosting the population to 85. In 1623, it was up to 180. In 1630 it was around 300 and in 1643, around 2000. Between 1630 and 1640, in the so-called Great Migration, 20,000 settlers arrived in Massachusetts. Perhaps the Indians should have put up a fence or something at the border.

The Puritans were abandoning England by the boat load, literally. James was bad enough but his son, Charles, was worse. He wanted to move the Church of England away from Calvinism and even married a Catholic French Princess in 1525, and that was the last straw. A series of events began that eventually ended in Charles being beheaded by the parliamentary Puritans; a king of England losing his head over a woman. Now there’s a switch.

The Calvinists in Parliament decided that they could manage without the King and his popish relatives, and so in a series of civil wars that lasted from 1642 to 1655, they overthrew the royalist government and, in 1649, cut off Charles’ head. They declared a Commonwealth ruled by a Council of State, which included Oliver Cromwell, a general of the Puritan forces. The royalists were finally completely defeated in one more Civil War and during which Cromwell conquered Catholic Ireland. The butcher's bill for keeping England Calvinist and Protestant was incalculable, almost one million people in England Scotland and Ireland taken as a whole, lands of which Cromwell was the Lord “Protector”. Forty percent of Ireland’s population died of war and manufactured famine in one of the most brutal ethnic cleansings in history. At the Siege of Drogheda in September 1649, Cromwell's troops massacred nearly 3,500 people after the town's capture, soldiers, civilians, prisoners, and Roman Catholic priests, burning many of them alive in their church. Cromwell wrote of the event:

“I am persuaded that this is a righteous judgment of God upon these barbarous wretches, who have imbued their hands in so much innocent blood and that it will tend to prevent the effusion of blood for the future, which are satisfactory grounds for such actions, which otherwise cannot but work remorse and regret.”

This was just one of many massacres. In addition to the starvation and murder of at least 600,000, some 50,000 Irish were sold as slaves during the time of the English Commonwealth. Oliver Cromwell is certainly among the greatest mass murderers in human history. Curiously enough, the last battle of the English civil wars was fought in America. In 1655, at the Battle of the Severn, Puritans defeated the governor of Maryland, William Stone who was fighting to restore his government in the colony and its policy of religious toleration.

Once again what has this to do with the Hootenanny Mass? The heart of the matter is found in the Mayflower compact. It is the foundational document of the country even more than the Declaration of Independence and almost no one has ever heard of it. Before getting off the ship the colonists created a form of government that depended on nothing but its own will. “(We) Combine ourselves together into a Civil Body Politic...” the document read. Not God not King, not custom nor law, but, “(we) the body politic.” In this document, the modern world was born, and nothing is so modern as the Hootenanny Mass and all that came with it. We will govern ourselves. Not popes nor bishops, nor kings nor customs.

NEXT WEEK: THE MAYFLOWER GOES TO SEED: THE MAYFLOWER’S DESCENDANTS AND THE PRESBYTERIAN REVOLT