Abstract
Scholars across different disciplines have long pondered on how and why people can be motivated to kill one another in large numbers. Religion is widely recognized as a prime driver of such violence. In this book, Matthew Rowley focuses on seventeenth-century puritans, whom he declares at the outset to have ‘exerted enormous energy towards killing countless humans’ on both sides of the Atlantic (1). Consequently, although Godly Violence in the Puritan Atlantic World only occasionally touches on maritime matters, maritime historians wishing to understand the troubled evolution of the early modern Atlantic world might well find it useful.
The monograph consciously builds on the studies of John Morrill and others who have done so much to reintegrate religion into early modern political and military history over recent decades. 1 Rowley acknowledges a debt to Barbara Donagan's work on martial codes of conduct and the mentalities of early modern English military communities. 2 Lastly, Godly Violence reflects the growing academic interest in cultural interactions around the early modern British Atlantic. As a result, the author has been able to demonstrate how closely puritan communities in seventeenth-century Britain and America were linked, and in so doing has provided insights into the mentality of hotter Protestants. Their hunger to attain moral hegemony around the Atlantic rim – often by brutally lethal means – comes out in the book, as does the use of Providence to justify and rationalize that violence.
Dividing his study into three main sections, labelled the dawn, day and dusk of puritanism, Rowley highlights the shifting trends and patterns in godly exegesis as the religio-political influence of puritanism waxed and waned. This helps the reader to discern the ways in which that exegesis encouraged and rationalized violence in response to real or imagined existential threats posed by a series of ungodly enemies, and how other puritans criticized such conduct, and advocated restraint. The decision to compare specific examples of godly violence around the Atlantic is justified by evidence that the campaigns against the Algonquin in New England were closely followed on the other side of the ocean. Similarly, American colonists took a keen interest in the civil wars unfolding in the British archipelago, and some sailed over to fight in them. Rowley argues persuasively that puritans invariably saw themselves as victims rather than victimizers in these episodes – an attitude so often exhibited even today by those seeking to justify massacres and genocide. The study is particularly effective in demonstrating how godly preachers were able to deploy Scripture to ‘other’ or ‘same’ their enemies. Heathen Algonquin and Irish Catholics were predictably ‘othered’. By contrast, Scottish Presbyterians were portrayed as co-religionists who should have known better than to challenge God's will by opposing the godly English Commonwealth. The manner of this ‘saming’ is very similar to the way in which Cavalier-Anglicans after the Restoration considered respectable English Presbyterians to be vipers within the bosom of the Church of England, and therefore far more pernicious than honest rebels such as the Fifth Monarchists.
It has to be said that Presbyterians cut an equally ambivalent silhouette in this book. The author is quite right to flag up the slippery nomenclature of puritanism in his introduction, given that the term covers such an expansive and nebulous range of constituencies, from socially conservative Presbyterians to Baptists and Congregationalists, through to more esoteric radicals. However, it would have been helpful had the introduction gone on to offer a working definition of puritanism and its principal subtypes, rather simply referring the reader to overviews by other scholars. As it is, it is not until page 134 that the reader is belatedly informed that this study does not seek to analyse godly violence across the whole spectrum of puritanism, but rather to concentrate on radical Independents. It could, of course, be argued that Scottish Presbyterians were not ‘puritans’ in the accepted sense, so the decision to portray them merely as opponents of radical English puritans is understandable, even though – contrary to the assertion on page 136 – the Covenanters did invade Ireland in April 1642 to help suppress the Catholic insurrection, and were still fighting a brutal war there in 1649. However, even English Presbyterians do not come across as authentic puritans in this book. This is a pity, as the disputes between the various parliamentarian factions over the prosecution of the wars in the British archipelago could have provided some useful nuances for Rowley's model of puritan aggression. The New Model Army, which emerged from those disputes, is pivotal to the author's argument, but (despite isolated comments on the heterogeneity within its ranks) the depiction of the soldiery comes uncomfortably close to caricature – a host of godly zombies. The assertion that lay preaching within the army was ‘permitted and celebrated’ (59) disregards the fact that orthodox puritan divines such as Richard Baxter found such amateur exegesis offensive and heretical. Members of Parliament passed legislation to prohibit lay preaching, and the Committee of Both Kingdoms and the Westminster Assembly thereafter repeatedly pressed Lord-General Thomas Fairfax to enforce the ban. Much as advocates such as Joshua Sprigge sought to portray the New Model Army as a godly army, in actuality there was a huge gulf between rhetoric and reality.
These reservations aside, Godly Violence in the Puritan Atlantic World is an ambitious attempt to throw light on a notoriously complex subject. This book provides much food for thought and plenty of avenues for further research. One big question that remains to be answered is whether there was anything truly distinctive about godly puritan violence (as opposed to Catholic-led campaigns in Maryland against the Susquehannock or royalist-leaning Virginia's wars against the Powhatans, for example). Hopefully Rowley's recent book, God, Religious Extremism and Violence, being set in a broader context, resolves many of the issues raised here. 3