page_title: John Cotton (minister)
section_title: North American colonization
hierarchical_section_title: John Cotton (minister) / Early life / North American colonization
caption_attribution_description: English: Arrival of the Winthrop Colony in Boston
context_page_description: John Cotton was a clergyman in England and the American colonies and was considered the preeminent minister and theologian of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He studied for five years at Trinity College, Cambridge, and another nine at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He had already built a reputation as a scholar and outstanding preacher when he accepted the position of minister in 1612 at St. Botolph's Church, Boston in Lincolnshire. As a Puritan, he wanted to do away with the ceremony and vestments associated with the established Church of England and to preach in a simpler manner. He felt that the English church needed significant reforms, but he was adamant about not separating from it; his preference was to change it from within.
  Many ministers were removed from their pulpits in England for their Puritan practices, but Cotton thrived at St. Botolph's for nearly 20 years because of supportive aldermen and lenient bishops, as well as his conciliatory and gentle demeanor. By 1632, however, the church authorities had greatly increased pressure on non-conforming clergy, and Cotton was forced into hiding. The following year, he and his wife boarded a ship for New England.
context_section_description: The options for Puritan ministers who lacked Cotton's success at avoiding the church authorities were to either go underground or to form a separatist church on the Continent.  In the late 1620s, however, another option emerged as America began to open for colonization.  With this new prospect, a staging area was established at Tattershall, near Boston, which was the seat of Theophilus Clinton, 4th Earl of Lincoln.  Cotton and the Earl's chaplain Samuel Skelton conferred extensively, before Skelton left England to be the minister for the company of John Endicott in 1629.  Cotton firmly opposed separatism, whereby newly formed churches in New England or continental Europe refused communion with the Church of England or with the continental reformed churches.  For this reason, he was upset to learn that Skelton's church at Naumkeag (later Salem, Massachusetts) had opted for such separatism and had refused to offer communion to newly arriving colonists.  In particular, he was grieved to learn that William Coddington, his friend and parishioner from Boston (Lincolnshire), was not allowed to have his child baptized "because he was no member of any particular reformed church, though of the catholic" (universal).
  In July 1629, Cotton took part in a planning conference for emigration at Sempringham in Lincolnshire.  Other future New England colonists who participated in the planning were Thomas Hooker, Roger Williams, John Winthrop, and Emmanuel Downing.  Cotton did not emigrate for several more years, though he did travel to Southampton to preach the farewell sermon to Winthrop's party.  Of Cotton's thousands of sermons, this was the earliest one to be published.  He also offered support to those who had already sailed, and he arranged in a 1630 letter for a hogshead of meal to be sent to Coddington who was at Naumkeag.
  Shortly after seeing the New England colonists on their way, both Cotton and his wife became seriously ill from malaria.  They stayed at the manor house of the Earl of Lincoln for nearly a year; he eventually recovered, but his wife died.  He decided to travel to complete his recovery and, while doing so, he became much more aware of the dangers that Puritans were facing throughout England.  Nathaniel Ward wrote of his summons to court in a December 1631 letter to Cotton, mentioning that Thomas Hooker had already fled from Essex and gone to Holland.  The letter is representative of the "emotional agony" faced by these ministers, and Ward wrote it as a sort of "good-bye", knowing that he would be removed from his ministry.  Cotton and Ward met again in New England.
caption: Cotton traveled to Southampton to preach the farewell sermon to the members of the Winthrop Fleet.
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 Windows", "Image DateTime": "2008:12:13 17:26:52", "Image ExifOffset": "172", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "310", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "6274", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "673", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "428"}