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Puritans in Colonial Virginia
Please add profiles of people associated with Puritanism in Virginia before 1650.
Extracted from: Butterfield, Kevin. Puritans in Colonial Virginia. (2020, December 07). In Encyclopedia Virginia. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/puritans-in-colonial-virginia.
In the 1620s and 1630s, several hundred < Puritan > men and women emigrated from England and settled in Virginia. Puritans protested the retention of certain Catholic practices in the Church of England and sought religious reform. As the Crown began to enforce conformity to the established church, English Puritans looked to Virginia both as a land of opportunity and as a haven where they could form godly communities of fellow believers and worship in churches without what they perceived as extraneous ceremony. These men and women mainly settled south of the James River, where they formed their own churches, elected and dispatched delegates to the House of Burgesses, and made every effort to create and preserve a religious community. But the rest of the colony hardened toward them, particularly after Sir William Berkeley arrived as governor in 1642. Berkeley, under orders from King Charles I, began to push almost immediately for religious uniformity and adherence to the Anglican church. Between 1643 and 1649, a series of controversies, legal challenges, and local power struggles arose between Puritans and Anglicans, exacerbated by news of the English Civil Wars. Intolerance toward Puritan believers resulted in the expulsion of several Puritan clergymen and at least one lay preacher, and, by 1650, led most Virginia Puritans to abandon the colony for Maryland. …
In the 1620s, Puritan leaders began to establish religious communities on the south side of the James River. Christopher Lawne, a leading Puritan who had settled in Holland for a time, emigrated to the Southside region with other dissenters in 1619; in November 1621, the Virginia Company granted land to Edward Bennett, a Puritan merchant from London, and other men “who undertook to settle 200 persons in the colony.” Bennett established a large property called Bennett’s Welcome near the former Indian village of Warraskoyack. His nephews, Philip and Richard Bennett, soon followed. By the end of the 1630s, the Bennetts held more than 10,000 acres in the colony. The Lawne and the Bennett families helped introduce several hundred Puritans to the southern reaches of Virginia. Another Puritan colonist, Daniel Gookin, transported nearly fifty people to the colony and, under the headright system, received a grant of 2,500 acres along the Nansemond River. …
… by 1649, most of the Puritans in < Lower Norfolk > and < Nansemond > counties had followed him there. In Maryland, the Puritans continued to worship as they saw fit, occasionally seeking advice from the ministry of New England. By 1650, there were no congregations in Virginia that could rightfully be called Puritan.
References
- Billings, Warren M. Sir William Berkeley and the Forging of Colonial Virginia. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004.
- Bond, Edward L. Damned Souls in a Tobacco Colony: Religion in Seventeenth-Century Virginia. Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 2001.
- Butler, Jon, ed. “Two 1642 Letters of Virginia Puritans,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 84 (1972): 99–109.
- Butterfield, Kevin. “Puritans and Religious Strife in the Early Chesapeake.” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 109, no. 1 (2001): 5–36.
- Collinson, Patrick. The Elizabethan Puritan Movement. London: Jonathan Cape, 1967.
- Hatfield, April Lee. Atlantic Virginia: Intercolonial Relations in the Seventeenth Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
- Kukla, Jon. Political Institutions in Virginia, 1619–1660. New York: Garland Publishing, 1989.
- Levy, Babette M. “Early Puritanism in the Southern and Island Colonies,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 70 (1960): 69–348.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bennett_(colonist) Edward Bennett (1577 – bef. 1651), was an English merchant based in London, and a free member of the Virginia Company. A Puritan who had lived in Amsterdam for a period, he established the first large plantation in the colony of Virginia in North America, in what became known as < Warrosquyoake Shire > (later as Isle of Wight County).
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Berkeley_(governor) Sir William Berkeley (/ˈbɑːrkliː/; 1605 – 9 July 1677) was an English colonial administrator who served as the governor of Virginia from 1660 to 1677. … Berkeley was "bitterly hostile" to Virginia's Puritans and Quakers. In an attempt to oppress them, Berkeley helped enact a law to "preserve the Established Church's [The Church of England] Unity and purity of doctrine". It punished any minister who preached outside the teachings and doctrine of this church, thus oppressing Puritans, Quakers, and any other religious minority.[10]: p254
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Gookin Danyell "Daniel" Gookin (1612 – 19 March 1687) was a Munster colonist, settler of Virginia and Massachusetts, and a writer on the subject of American Indians.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Lawne Christopher Lawne was an English merchant and Puritan of note, who was among the earliest settlers in the Virginia Colony in the early 17th century. Born in Blandford, Dorset, he emigrated on the Marygold in May 1618 and died in Virginia the following year.
- Maryland's History. < Link > Because Anglicanism had become the official religion in Virginia, a band of Puritans in 1642 left for Maryland; they founded Providence (now called Annapolis). In 1650, the Puritans revolted against the proprietary government. They set up a new government prohibiting both Catholicism and Anglicanism.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annapolis,_Maryland A settlement in the Province of Maryland named "Providence" was founded on the north shore of the Severn River on the middle Western Shore of the Chesapeake Bay in 1649 by Puritan exiles from the Province/Dominion of Virginia led by the third Proprietary Governor of Maryland, William Stone (1603–1660).
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stone_(Maryland_governor) William Stone, 3rd Proprietary Governor of Province of Maryland (c. 1603 – c. 1660) was an early English settler in Maryland. He was governor of the colony of Maryland from 1649 to 1655. … Stone came to America, in 1619, with a group of Puritans, who settled on the Eastern shore, of Chesapeake Bay, in the colony of Virginia. The first Puritan settlement, in Virginia, thrived, but eventually came into conflict with the established Episcopal Church. In 1648, William Stone reached an agreement, with Cecilius Calvert, the 2nd Lord Baltimore to resettle the Virginia Puritan colonists, in the central region of the Province of Maryland.