Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 72:1 (Spring 2010)
Article: John Cotton’s Bequest To Sir Henry Vane The Younger
Author: David Parnham

WTJ 72:1 (Spring 2010) p. 71

John Cotton’s Bequest To Sir Henry Vane The Younger

David Parnham

David Parnham is an independent scholar who lives in Melbourne, Australia.

During the cold winter of 1636-1637, when “hot contentions and paroxysms” were swelling and burning “in these poor Churches,” the eldership of New England assembled to articulate its collective mind and to call John Cotton to account.1 And while errors and heresies orbited around Cotton’s preaching of free grace, the young governor Henry Vane was fully engaged in promoting the cause of the free-grace party2 The experience of leadership in controversy, perhaps, would stand the governor in good stead. Parliamentarian, diplomat, administrator, war-party leader, Vane would later maintain friendship and alliance with Oliver Cromwell until the latter’s dissolution of the Rump Parliament in April 1653, whereupon Vane became a voice of the watch, warning his countrymen, in idioms ranging from the stately to the apocalyptic, that hypocrisy and tyranny had not been stamped out in England.3 Evidently New Englanders witnessed in incipience certain qualities of personality that would mark the later Vane: audacity and ingenuity, a taste for controversy, a capacity to cultivate an affiliation and to prosecute an interest, a willingness to question standards and assumptions—in particular, standards and assumptions concerning religion. Vane would prove himself to be in possession of a subtle theological intellect; but the documentary remains of the free-grace controversy offer scant clues to the workings of that intellect during the two years

WTJ 72:1 (Spring 2010) p. 72

when Cotton, with whom Vane lodged upon arrival in Boston, must have been on tap to Vane for frequent tutelage in matters of divinity. Indeed, it is not until 1655, with the publication of The Retired Mans Meditations, that the restive glory of Vane’s religious mind presents itself in print.

The Meditations is a significant artifact of Interregnum England. One dimension of its significance lies in its conveyance of an ancestry: it carried into the Interregnum, largely for polemical purposes, a cluster of theological commitments distilled from John Cotton’s New England teachings of the mid-1630s. Some New Englanders—most notoriously, Anne Hutchinson—came, under Cotton’s instruction, to rethink the relative alignments of works and grace, of faith and obligation, of Christ and soul, of God’s conditional and absolute beneficence, of ecclesiastically mediated knowledge and immediate spiritual revelation. Vane offers a rich te...