Chapter excerpt · The Lives Before Us
Counting the Cost
By the late 1630s, Hugh and Ann Calkins were raising their children within the demanding but familiar rhythms of family life. The family had reason to remain where they were.
England, however, was changing. King Charles I increasingly expected religious conformity throughout his realm, and Archbishop William Laud pursued greater uniformity in the worship, ceremonies, and governance of the Church of England. Ministers who resisted conformity could be censured, suspended, or deprived of their parish livings. The question was no longer simply how Christians should worship. Increasingly, it was about who possessed the authority to determine the worship of Christ’s Church.
For families sympathetic to further Protestant reform, the space for conscientious disagreement was narrowing. Hugh left no record describing his thoughts about particular ceremonies or episcopal policies, and nothing establishes that he had yet decided to leave England. The evidence becomes firmer only when Hugh appears in association with the Puritan minister Richard Blinman.
About a dozen years Hugh’s junior, Blinman matriculated at New Inn Hall, Oxford, in 1635 and received his bachelor’s degree the following January. He soon entered the ministry at Chepstow in Monmouthshire, but his settled ministry proved brief. Later accounts identify him as having been silenced for nonconformity before he emigrated to New England with members of his congregation. His willingness to surrender a settled ministry rather than conform illustrates the choices confronting some Puritan clergy during these years.
How might a family from Waverton have become connected with a minister from Chepstow? Their later migration in the same company establishes the association, but the meetings, journeys, or friendships that brought them into the same religious fellowship have not been found.
By then Hugh was approaching forty. He was a husband, the father of several children, and an established member of the Waverton community. His private religious experience remains private. Nevertheless, his association with Blinman and the community around him places Hugh within a recognizable Puritan religious network.
For Hugh Calkins, the religious conflicts of these years therefore came increasingly close to home. They raised a fundamental question: Where could a Christian find a church whose teaching, worship, and authority could be trusted? The question leads me to wonder about his spiritual dis-ease. Puritanism offered one answer. It emphasized the authority of Scripture, serious preaching, disciplined Christian living, and communities ordered around a shared understanding of the gospel. For Christians who believed the English Reformation remained incomplete, the established church could become a source of uncertainty as well as stability.
What happened next is clearer. Hugh and his family crossed the Atlantic in the company associated with Blinman. In New England, Hugh remained among families connected with that migration and eventually entered the Congregational religious world that gave Puritan reform institutional form.
Hugh’s story was not simply one man’s search for a different church. Puritan spirituality was profoundly communal. Families sought pastors they trusted and other families with whom they could worship, raise children, discipline community life, and establish institutions intended to endure. Migration offered the possibility not merely of leaving an unsatisfactory religious order, but of constructing a more faithful one.
I need not claim that religion alone sent Hugh Calkins across the Atlantic. His personal reasons for emigrating may have never been recorded. Family, land, security, opportunity, and religion rarely separated themselves neatly in seventeenth century lives. But Hugh did not leave alone. He migrated within a religious community, remained connected with its members, and eventually helped give Puritan convictions durable institutional form. For the Wolfhardts, reform transformed the church they inherited. For John Strong, migration created a place where he eventually helped build a church. For Hugh Calkins, his entire religious community appears to have traveled with him.
