Why the Puritans persecuted Quakers

It seems simple enough: the Puritans believed Quakers were heretics. In fact, anyone who was not an Anglican was a heretic, including Catholics, Lutherans, Anabaptists, Antinomians, Quakers, Ranters, Jews… in short, anyone who was not Anglican.

Since heretics blasphemed God and put barriers in the way of salvation, they were persecuted. This was true throughout the Protestant Reformation: when a particular religion or denomination was adopted by a court or principality, all other religions or sects became illegal and heretical, and were punished to varying degrees.

In fact, the Puritans had left England because they had been considered heretics there, and been persecuted.

So when Quakers showed up in Boston in the 1650s, it’s no surprise they were persecuted. But it wasn’t just about their religion. The persecution of Quakers was also part of the Massachusetts Puritans’ determination to function as a sovereign state, independent of England.

The Puritans who had remained in England during the Great Migration to America of the 1630s drifted apart from their New England brethren. They were more inclined to allow toleration of other professions of Christian faith. The impossibility of reforming, or purifying, the Anglican Church in England was slowly rejected in favor of the much more doable task of simply confirming England as a Protestant nation by allowing any and all Protestants to worship relatively freely. Very soon after English Puritans regained power in the Long Parliament of 1640, they made public their openness to toleration and to presbyterianism, a system in which the state governs the church and appoints a hierarchy to run it as a whole.

To the New England Puritans, both toleration and presbyterianism were anathema. They had spent painstaking years establishing and codifying a church polity (the New England Way) based on the supremacy of the individual congregation. The state in Massachusetts did not appoint clergy, nor was there one over-arching body that regulated churches. Each individual church was an independent body. And only one church was tolerated in Massachusetts: the Congregational church.

Throughout the 1630s the Puritans of Massachusetts had been ready to fight to defend their independence from England. They elected their own governor and General Court (a combined legislature and judiciary). Threats during the 1630s of a royal governor being appointed in and sent from England were taken as threats of war. And when, in the 1640s, the Puritan Parliament espoused toleration, Massachusetts took that as a threat, too, and had no intention of submitting to it.

So persecuting the Quakers who came in the 1650s was a foregone conclusion. They were both heretics and a test of Massachusetts’ autonomy. Persecutions went on according to the General Court’s decrees until 1661. That’s because in 1660, the Long Parliament officially established toleration (and presbyterianism), and Charles II, newly settled on the throne, sent a letter to Massachusetts governor Endecott ordering the persecutions to stop. According to the “King’s Missive,” any Quaker accused of breaking the law in Massachusetts should be sent to England for trial.

This no Massachusetts Puritan would stand for. They would rather stop the persecutions than give up the authority of their locally elected General Court. They didn’t stop immediately, but slowly the persecutions were curtailed.

Charles II issued his mandate for two reasons. First, he was a not too-well closeted Catholic, and Quakers and Catholics were about the only groups who found absolutely no acceptance in England. If Charles could win tolerance for Quakers (the least objectionable of the two, for at least they were Protestants), perhaps he could win eventual tolerance for Catholics. Second, he cast a dark eye on Massachusetts’ autonomy. Agents who had grudges against the New England Puritans were working in England to undermine the colony’s government, and had Charles’ ear when they said the New England Puritans were all rebels. It didn’t help that two of the judges who had condemned his father, Charles I, to death had fled to New Haven in 1660 and received a hero’s welcome there.

So New England had no choice but to submit to the law of toleration. It was a crimp on its sovereignty, but it was a barrier against the even greater threat of direct rule that it might bring down on itself if it disobeyed the new king.

This battle between New England Puritans and King and Parliament would go on until 1691, when the Massachusetts Bay Colony charter was revoked and the colony came under direct rule from England. But just a little over 80 years later, the descendants of the Puritans would buck off English rule for good.