¹ Pierce, Richard D., ed., The Records of the First Church of Boston, 1630–1868, 3 vols, Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts 39–41 (Boston, MA, 1961), 1: 62Google Scholar.

² It was common practice in New England for ministers to be ordained, not simply installed, as they began to pastor a congregation, regardless of whether they had been ordained before. This was based on key ecclesiological differences between Congregationalism on the one side, and Presbyterianism and Episcopalianism on the other. Congregationalists questioned the existence of a visible catholic or universal Church and instead saw individual congregations as the most fundamental representation of the Church. They believed that a minister's office was derived from congregational assent and was therefore ultimately bound up with individual churches. See Nuttall, Geoffrey F., Visible Saints: The Congregational Way, 1640–1660 (Oxford, 1957), 88–91Google Scholar; Hall, David, The Faithful Shepherd: A History of the New England Ministry in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill, NC, 1972), 102–3Google Scholar; Bremer, Francis, Lay Empowerment and the Development of Puritanism (Basingstoke, 2015), 96–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar. As Davenport, the protagonist of this case study, argued, ministers were ‘limited to the Church’: ‘take away the relation [between the congregation and its officer], the office (and so the work) ceaseth.’ Davenport, John, An Answer of the Elders of the Several Churches in New England unto Nine Positions Sent Over to Them (London, 1643), 66Google Scholar.

³ Bremer, Francis, Building a New Jerusalem: John Davenport, a Puritan in Three Worlds (New Haven, CT, 2012), 254–350CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cooper, James F., Tenacious of their Liberties: The Congregationalists in Colonial Massachusetts (New York, 1999), 88–114CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Knight, Janice, Orthodoxies in Massachusetts: Rereading American Puritanism (Cambridge, MA, 1994), 189–97Google Scholar; Hall, Michael G., The Last American Puritan: The Life of Increase Mather, 1639–1723 (Middletown, CT, 1988), 55–60, 78–82Google Scholar.

⁴ ‘Half-Way Covenant’ was originally a term of disparagement, coined only in the mid-eighteenth century. It refers to the practice, endorsed by the Boston synod of 1662, of allowing baptized adults to present their children for baptism, regardless of whether or not the parents were fully covenanted members of the church. Since the term ‘Half-Way Covenant’ is widely used in current scholarship, this article applies it when discussing that practice. See Pope, Robert G., The Half-Way Covenant: Church Membership in Puritan New England (Princeton, NJ, 1969), 7–8Google Scholar; Gerbner, Katharine, ‘Beyond the “Halfway Covenant”: Church Membership, Extended Baptism, and Outreach in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1656–1667’, The New England Quarterly 85 (2012), 281–301CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 286–7; Winship, Michael P., Hot Protestants: A History of Puritanism in England and America (New Haven, CT, 2018), 192Google Scholar.

⁵ Ethan Shagan, The Birth of Modern Belief: Faith and Judgment from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ, 2019), 140.

⁶ Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999), 19. Walsham also draws attention to Robert T. Kendall's similar observation in his analysis of puritans’ ‘experimental predestinarianism’ in his Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 (Oxford, 1979), 79–138. Other early discussions of puritan providentialism include Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA, 1954); Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge, 1982), 116–68; and Barbara Donagan's many writings, such as ‘Providence, Chance and Explanation: Some Paradoxical Aspects of Puritan Views of Causation’, JRH 11 (1981), 385–403.

⁷ Andrew Dorsey, ‘A Rhetoric of American Experience: Thomas Shepard's Cambridge Confessions and the Discourse of Spiritual Hypocrisy’, Early American Literature 49 (2014), 629–62, at 633.

⁸ Shagan, The Birth of Modern Belief, 140.

⁹ Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England, 17.

¹⁰ David Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (New York, 1989), 71–116.

¹¹ John Davenport to the First Church Boston, 8 October 1667, in Letters of John Davenport, Puritan Divine, ed. Isabel M. Calder (New Haven, CT, 1937), 270.

¹² Ibid.

¹³ Stephen Foster, The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570–1700 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1991), 196–202; Winship, Hot Protestants, 190–2; Francis Bremer, ‘Norton, John (1606–1663)’, ODNB, online edn (2004), at: <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/20348>, accessed 15 February 2023.

¹⁴ Winship, Hot Protestants, 189; Bremer, Lay Empowerment and the Development of Puritanism, 166.

¹⁵ Charles J. Hoadly, ed., Records of the Colony or Jurisdiction of New Haven, from May, 1653, to the Union. Together with New Haven Code of 1656 (Hartford, CT, 1858), 196–8.

¹⁶ William Gouge, The Minutes and Papers of the Westminster Assembly, 1643–1652, ed. Chad Van Dixhoorn, 5 vols (Oxford, 2012), 5: 234.

¹⁷ Boston, MA, The Congregational Library & Archives, MS 5374, John Davenport Sermon Book, 1649–52, 347 (15 August 1652). Other Congregational leaders shared this observation: John Cotton, Of the Holinesse of Church-Members (London, 1650), 27; Thomas Hooker, A Survey of the Summe of Church-Discipline (London, 1648), 28.

¹⁸ The Congregational Library & Archives, MS 5374, John Davenport Sermon Book, 1649–1652, 344, 345, 347 (15 August 1652). Davenport quoted Cotton and Hooker verbatim at times in these notes, and here he was citing Hooker, Survey, 32. There is ample secondary literature on admission tests or spiritual assessment as a way for Congregationalists to keep out hypocrites: see, for example, Paul Miller, The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge, MA, 1967), 568–81; Sarah Rivett, The Science of the Soul in Colonial New England (Chapel Hill, NC, 2011), 31–2, 36–7, 61–2.

¹⁹ New Haven, CT, Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, GEN MSS 202, John Davenport Sermons and Writings, 1615–1658, ‘Sermons Preached at New Haven, 1656–1658’, 71–2 (9 November 1656); John Cotton, Holinesse, 107 (mispaginated as 95).

²⁰ Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, GEN MSS 202, John Davenport Sermons and Writings, 1615–1658, ‘Sermons Preached at New Haven, 1656–1658’, 68 (9 November 1656).

²¹ Paul R. Lucas, ‘Presbyterianism Comes to Connecticut: The Toleration Act of 1669’, Journal of Presbyterian History 50 (1972), 129–47; idem, Valley of Discord: Church and Society along the Connecticut River, 1636–1725 (Hanover, NH, 1976), 73–86. John Warham would abandon the Half-Way Covenant in 1664, which further divided the Windsor First Church: ibid. 78–9.

²² Bremer, Davenport, 301; Isabel M. Calder, The New Haven Colony, Yale Historical Publications Miscellany 28 (New Haven, CT, 1934), 249–53.

²³ Davenport, as quoted by Edward E. Atwater, History of the Colony of New Haven to its Absorption into Connecticut (Meriden, CT, 1902), 527.

²⁴ Bremer, Davenport, 317–18. Hutchinson, Oliver and Grubb were among those who petitioned the General Court to release imprisoned Baptists in November 1668. While Leverett did not sign the petition, he refused to issue an arrest warrant in the same year and was praised by Baptists for his tolerance: E. Brooks Holifield, ‘On Toleration in Massachusetts’, ChH 38 (1969), 188–200, at 92–3. When the General Court legislated that Quakers should be banished ‘upon paine of death’ in October 1658, future supporters of Davenport, such as Hutchinson and Clark, dissented from the majority of the court, resisting the heavy-handed approach promoted by their former church leaders Norton and Wilson: John Norton, The Heart of N-England Rent at the Blasphemies of the Present Generation (Cambridge, MA, 1659), 48–9; Bremer, Davenport, 317; Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, ed., Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, 5 vols (Boston, MA, 1853–4), 4/1: 346. For Davenport's own disapproval of the imposition of death penalties upon Quaker missionaries, such as Mary Dyer, see Davenport to John Winthrop Jr, 6 December 1659, in Letters, 147–8.

²⁵ Bremer, Davenport, 317; idem, ‘The New England Way Reconsidered: An Exploration of Church Polity and the Governance of the Region's Churches’, in Elliot Vernon and Hunter Powell, eds, Church Polity and Politics in the British Atlantic World, c.1635–66 (Manchester, 2020), 155–73, at 169.

²⁶ London, TNA (PRO), SP 14/173, fol. 50^r, John Davenport to Sir Edward Conway, Secretary of State, 13 October 1624.

²⁷ Ibid.

²⁸ Ibid.

²⁹ John Davenport to Lady Mary Vere, 1633, in Letters, 38–9.

³⁰ The Feoffees for Impropriations was an organization established in 1625, and Davenport was one of the clerical feoffees. They solicited funds to buy impropriations and advowsons with the aim of appointing puritan-leaning ministers to strategic places throughout the kingdom, ‘especially in Cities, and Market Towns’, clearly targeted in order to build up godly sympathies in places that sent MPs to the House of Commons: Samuel Clarke, A Collection of the Lives of Ten Eminent Divines (London, 1662), 111.

³¹ John Davenport to Lady Mary Vere, 1633, in Letters, 39.

³² A recent and thorough account of Whalley and Goffe's flight to America is Matthew Jenkinson, Charles I's Killers in America: The Lives & Afterlives of Edward Whalley & William Goffe (Oxford, 2019). See also Bremer, Davenport, 286; Christopher Durston, Cromwell's Major-Generals: Godly Government during the English Revolution (Manchester, 2001), 235–6.

³³ TNA (PRO), Colonial State Papers, CO 1/15, nos 80, 81, Sir Thomas Temple to Secretary of State William Morice, 20 August 1661. Jenkinson seems to portray Temple as simply another Royalist authority who distrusted Davenport and genuinely desired to capture the regicides, but Temple would become a hearty supporter of Davenport's ministry and a regular attendee at the First Church of Boston, where Davenport became pastor. Davenport's protection of the regicides and preaching in support of them is discussed in Jenkinson, Charles I's Killers in America, 52.

³⁴ John Davenport to Thomas Temple, 19 August 1661, in Letters, 193.

³⁵ Boston, MA, Massachusetts Historical Society, Winthrop Family Papers, John Winthrop Jr to Richard Nicolls, 15 July 1667.

³⁶ Ibid.

³⁷ Ibid.

³⁸ For a concise description of the process of ordination among New England Congregationalist churches, see Ralph F. Young, ‘Breathing the “Free Aire of the New World”: The Influence of the New England Way on the Gathering of Congregational Churches in Old England, 1640–1660’, The New England Quarterly 83 (2010), 5–46, at 13–14.

³⁹ John Davenport to the First Church Boston, 8 October 1667, in Letters, 269–70.

⁴⁰ John Davenport to the First Church Boston, 28 October 1667, in Letters, 271.

⁴¹ Ibid.

⁴² Hamilton Andrews Hill, History of the Old South Church (Third Church) Boston: 1669–1884, 2 vols (Boston, MA, 1890), 1: 14–15.

⁴³ Davenport to the First Church Boston, 28 October 1667, in Letters, 272.

⁴⁴ In both the First Church controversy over Davenport's appointment and an earlier schism in Hartford over the selection of Michael Wigglesworth as minister in the late 1650s, the dissenting minority underwent a painful process of requesting a dismissal to no avail: see, below pp. 278–9, 283–5.

⁴⁵ Thomas Hutchinson, The Hutchinson Papers, ed. Henry William Whitmore and Williams S. Appleton, 2 vols (Albany, NY, 1865), 2: 65–7. During the negotiation, Massachusetts magistrates were even composing letters to other churches, asking them to provide ‘neighbourly assistance’ to the First Church if Norton were to be sent away. These letters were never sent because the First Church wanted to make their own arrangements.

⁴⁶ See Records of the First Church of Boston, 1630–1868, 1: 15–62.

⁴⁷ ‘Humble Request of the Dissenting Brethren’, 30 September 1667, in Hill, History of the Old South Church, 1: 16.

⁴⁸ ‘The Church of New Haven Letter in Answer to the Brethrens Letter Returned by Captain Clarke’, 28 October 1667, in Hill, History of the Old South Church, 1: 20.

⁴⁹ John Hull, ‘John Hull's Diary of Public Occurrences’, Archaeologia Americana: Transactions and Collections of the American Antiquarian Society 3 (1857), 109–318, at 227; Bremer, Davenport, 326. For John Hull's career, theological position, relationship with the First Church, Boston, and interpretation of divine providence, see Mark Valeri, Heavenly Merchandise: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America (Princeton, NJ, 2010), 74–110. For Valeri's discussion of Hull's close attention to everyday events, often natural phenomena like storms or cold winters, as signs of God's providence, see ibid. 91–2, 105.

⁵⁰ For a detailed account of the Hartford controversy, see Bremer, Davenport, 258–67.

⁵¹ Samuel Stone to the church of Hartford, 2 August 1657, in Collections of the Connecticut Historical Society, ed. James Hammond Trumbull, 31 vols (Hartford, CT, 1870), 2: 75.

⁵² Records of the First Church of Boston, 1630–1868, 1: 239–40. For a more detailed analysis of the Newport scandal, see Benjamin Franklin V, The Other John Adams, 1705–1740 (Madison, NJ, 2003), 27–52.

⁵³ See Barbara Donagan, ‘Godly Choice: Puritan Decision-Making in Seventeenth-Century England’, HThR 76 (1983), 307–34.

⁵⁴ Ibid. 311–12; Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England, 17–19.

⁵⁵ Samuel E. Morison, ed., Records of the Suffolk County Court, 1671–1680, 2 vols, Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts 29–30 (Boston, MA, 1933), 1: 546–7, 2: 656–8. Fogg's parents, Ralph, also a skinner, and Susanna, migrated from London to New England in 1633 but returned to England in 1652. Ezekiel Fogg was ‘citizen and skinner of London’ by 1673, but was spending extensive time in Boston in the 1670s: Susan Hardman Moore, Abandoning America: Life-Stories from Early New England (Woodbridge, 2013), 111–12; George Francis Dow, ed., Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County, Massachusetts, 9 vols (Salem, MA, 1911–75), 6: 82.

⁵⁶ Dow, ed., Records and Files of the Quarterly Courts of Essex County, Massachusetts, 2: 657.

⁵⁷ Ibid. 1: 169.

⁵⁸ Davenport to the First Church Boston, 28 October 1667, in Letters, 271.

⁵⁹ Here I cite the 1611 King James Version, which the notetaker seemed to use, although, in the sermon notes, the quoted verse appeared to be incomplete and mixed with other scriptural texts, such as Ps. 90: 12. See Cambridge, MA, Harvard University, Houghton Library, MS Am 2356, First Church (Cambridge, MA) Sermon Papers, 1665–1837, ‘Notes on Sermons Preached in Cambridge, Feb 1667 to Jul 1668’, 281.

⁶⁰ Bremer, Davenport, 327–8; Harvard University, Houghton Library, MS Am 2356, First Church (Cambridge, Mass.) Sermon Papers, 1665–1837, ‘Notes on Sermons Preached in Cambridge, Feb 1667 to Jul 1668’, 287 (mispaginated as 288).

⁶¹ Davenport to the First Church Boston, 28 October 1667, in Letters, 273.

⁶² For Davenport's prayer, recorded by Joshua Scottow, see Hill, History of the Old South Church, 1: 24.

⁶³ The established Congregationalist practice was that, after securing an agreement among themselves over the appointment of a candidate as church officer, the congregation would vote to elect the person, admit the elected candidate into their church and, finally, proceed to the formal ordination service: Young, ‘Breathing the “Free Aire of the New World”’, 13–14.

⁶⁴ ‘Copy of a Concealed Letter’, New Haven to the First Church Boston, 28 August 1668, in Hill, History of the Old South Church, 1: 30.

⁶⁵ ‘The Suppressed Letter’, New Haven to the First Church Boston, 12 October 1668, in Hill, History of the Old South Church, 1: 34.

⁶⁶ For a comparison between the edited letter and the actual letter, see Hill, History of the Old South Church, 1: 33–6.

⁶⁷ Scottow's account in Hill, History of the Old South Church, 1: 33.

⁶⁸ Ibid. 41.

⁶⁹ Massachusetts Historical Society, Winthrop Family Papers, John Davenport Jr to John Winthrop Jr, 12 December 1668. Bremer cites this letter as 10 December 1668, possibly because Davenport Jr recorded the date as ‘12.10.68’, but 10 signified the tenth month under the old style of dating, hence giving the date 12 December: cf. Bremer, Davenport, 333 n. 73.

⁷⁰ Ibid.

⁷¹ See, for example, Increase Mather's preface to John Davenport, Another Essay for Investigation of the Truth (Cambridge, MA, 1663).

⁷² The council also indicated that given the number of residents, Boston could use a third church anyway. See Scottow's account in Hill, History of the Old South Church, 1: 25–6, 28.

⁷³ See ibid. 1: 42.

⁷⁴ Ibid. 1: 63.

⁷⁵ John Davenport and James Penn to the messengers of the churches, 13 April 1669, in Hill, History of the Old South Church, 1: 60.

⁷⁶ Massachusetts Historical Society, Winthrop Family Papers, John Davenport Jr to John Winthrop Jr, 16 April 1669.

⁷⁷ Scottow's account in Hill, History of the Old South Church, 1: 60. Davenport Jr also recorded the attempt by Mather and other representatives’ to enter the First Church to speak to the First Church leaders in: Massachusetts Historical Society, Winthrop Family Papers, John Davenport Jr to Winthrop Jr, 16 April 1669.

⁷⁸ Scottow's account in Hill, History of the Old South Church, 1: 76.

⁷⁹ Bremer, Davenport, 338. Bremer noted that Thomas Thatcher prayed ‘that this infant church might live to condemn its condemners’, but the person who offered the prayer on this occasion was in fact John Oxenbridge, who would succeed Davenport as pastor of the First Church after the latter's death in 1670. See Scottow's account in Hill, History of the Old South Church, 1: 80. The citation Bremer provides is Davenport Jr's letter to John Winthrop Jr, in which Davenport Jr spoke of Thatcher's sermon on 22 December 1669 that marked the completion of the new church building: Hill, History of the Old South Church, 1: 139; Massachusetts Historical Society, Winthrop Family Papers, John Davenport Jr to John Winthrop Jr, 24 December 1669.

⁸⁰ Scottow's account in Hill, History of the Old South Church, 1: 82.

⁸¹ Ibid. 82.

⁸² Ibid.

⁸³ Ibid. 83.

⁸⁴ Ibid. 82.

⁸⁵ Ibid. 82.

⁸⁶ Ibid. 84.

⁸⁷ Ibid. 88.

⁸⁸ Richard Mather had been struggling with poor health for years, and was particularly troubled by kidney stones. On 16 April 1669, two days after he and other delegates were denied entry into the First Church, he started to suffer from the ‘a totall stoppage’ of urine. He was brought to Increase Mather's house in Boston that evening and returned to Dorchester the next morning: see Increase Mather, The Life and Death of that Reverend Man of God, Mr. Richard Mather, Teacher of the Church in Dorchester in New-England (Cambridge, MA, 1670), 26.

⁸⁹ Hull, ‘Diary’, 229.

⁹⁰ Davenport Jr recounted his father's death in detail in a letter to Winthrop Jr: Massachusetts Historical Society, Winthrop Family Papers, John Davenport Jr to Winthrop Jr, 28 March 1670. Winthrop Jr would later report it to Nicolls, the Royalist who had once inquired about Davenport's preaching: Massachusetts Historical Society, Winthrop Family Papers, John Winthrop Jr to Richard Nicolls, 24 September 1670.

⁹¹ Mather, Life, 27; Hall, The Last American Puritan, 80–1, 140–1.

⁹² Mather, Life, 27. Italics original.

⁹³ Increase Mather, The First Principles of New-England (Cambridge, MA, 1675), preface, unpaginated. Italics original. The preface was dated May 1671, but the work was not published until 1675.

⁹⁴ Sylvester Judd, History of Hadley, Including the Early History of Hatfield, South Hadley, Amherst and Granby, Massachusetts (Northampton, MA, 1863), 85–6.

⁹⁵ Hill, History of the Old South Church, 1: 97.

⁹⁶ Judd, History of Hadley, 86.

⁹⁷ Hill, History of the Old South Church, 1: 105.

⁹⁸ Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 106–8.

⁹⁹ Ibid. 94; Increase Mather, The Doctrine of Divine Providence Opened and Applyed (Boston, MA, 1684), 43.

¹⁰⁰ This discrepancy was not always obvious since seventeenth-century New Englanders enjoyed high literacy and religious proficiency: Hall, Worlds of Wonder, 21–70, esp. 21–43.