#BECAUSE IT WAS ENGLAND IN THE 17thC!! how is that hard to grasp

[sassiesillie]

Hmm..  many of these contradictory things are true. Puritans were religious extremists and also they did face religious oppression. 17th c England before the Civil Wars was extremely hardcore in its conformity requirements..this should not surprise anyone, really. You had to do as the Church of England (headed by the King) said. Sure, Puritans were told they couldn’t hate on Catholics and women and actors as much as they desperately wanted to (the Queen was Catholic, eg), but they were also told that they couldn’t publish books that expressed belief in, for example, the core Protestant tenet of predestination, which, until 1633, was an official Church of England belief as well. The consequences weren't that bad, tbh, mostly Puritans got fined and sometimes had their ears chopped off, but it was still technically religious oppression. Like, the direct opposite of freedom of religion.

I think some of this weird attitude in this post is rooted in the idea that "oppressed" must mean you're the good guys and the Puritans, as we all know, suck. But actually you can oppress people who suck, and England did that, like, a lot historically. Oppressed doesn't mean historically vindicated, or in the right in some way, it just means that a bigger and stronger group is curtailing your rights. In this case, the right to worship in a particular way. Puritans can still suck even while having their religious freedoms infringed by Archbishop William Laud, King Charles I, the court of Star Chamber (the court that sentenced the ear-chopping and sometimes branding as punishment for Puritan "sedition"), and the institution of the Church of England.

One thing to debunk: The major waves of Puritan immigration to America were not after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, but in the lead-up to the Civil Wars in the 1630s. Charles II (restored king) agreed not to exact any revenge for the civil war and regicide as a condition for the return of the monarchy; The Declaration of Breda granted a general pardon, and no one was exiled (though in fact some leaders were executed, often if Charles II kind of hated them personally). Most Puritan-founded towns in the US were founded in the lead-up to the First English Civil War, which broke out in 1639: Plymouth MA was founded (by Brownists, mostly) in 1620; Providence, RI, named for “God’s merciful Providence”, was settled in 1636; Cambridge, MA, founded by former Cambridge University profs in honor of their at-the-time-Puritan-leaning home institution, 1630. Many Puritans actually returned to England from the colonies after Charles I’s personal rule (and consequently his religious pal Laud’s influence on the Church of England) ended in 1641. Moreover, as historian Francis Bremer has shown, the number of Puritan migrants to New England was a fraction of the number of migrants to Virginia and the Caribbean (mostly motivated by the highly unethical economic opportunity afforded by plantations run on slave labour); however the Puritan settlements grew at a rapid rate due to high birth rates and lower death rates (fewer tropical diseases). Even before the Massachusetts Bay Colony was founded, the indigenous population in the Northeast had been pretty hard hit by European diseases, so the Puritan view was that land for godly resettlement was plentiful in the area (grim).

One thing that’s definite: Cromwell for sure sucks. He betrayed the “revolution” and scrapped the short-lived Republic by declaring himself dictator; he invaded Scotland when they said no thanks to that; he committed genocide in Ireland. Dude sucks and yeah, he was the poster-boy Puritan.

Cromwell's ascendancy was precipitated in part by a crumbling of the Puritan unity, as dissenters no longer had a common cause. Quakers, levellers, diggers, baptists, presbyterians, etc all splintered off and of course by 1660 the English puritan experiment was over, though 1662 would see a further clamp down on nonconformism in England once the monarchy was back in town. In the US the extremism was harder to maintain as the settlements boomed and as they got focused on colonizing and striking illegitimate deals with native tribes. OP is right about the war with the king and then overthrowing him and trying him for treason against his country thing being p rad though. (that was courtesy of the Parliamentarians as a whole, not specifically the Puritans, really)