Puritans, Witches & Kings and the Ousted Minister’s Flight to Concord

BY JAIMEE LEIGH JOROFF

Winter is here. Come in from the cold, sit by the fire, and let me tell you a story of an ousted Puritan who sailed across the ocean to what would become Concord, Massachusetts. His name was Peter Bulkeley and he traveled hither in the black garb of the Puritans, bearing with him his rigid beliefs in man’s inherent wickedness thrust for eternity upon them by the sins of Adam and Eve, and in a God whose mercy was reserved for only a chosen few. Tucked away in the back of his mind, were centuries of folklore and superstitions leached into the ground of old England, passed down by generations of storytellers.

Hailing from Odell in County Bedfordshire, Bulkeley most likely knew the ancient tales of beautiful, shapeshifting women such as the swan bride with the magic golden necklace who enchanted a fine lord in the woods, married him, and was followed by a curse. Or stories of children who disobediently played in the churchyard, summoning the devil who seized and flew them high into the air before plunging them into a cavernous pit in the earth that swallowed them whole, leaving only one stone behind as a reminder of those who laughed at religion. And most likely, in the forefront of his mind, the Reverend Peter Bulkeley was aware of witches!

600 years before, around 900 A.D. the Church had formally declared witchcraft, sorcery, and the like to be unreal, simply illusions imagined by those serving the devil instead of God. But, in the century before Bulkeley was born, German clergyman Heinrich Kramer wrote and published “The Malleus Maleficarum” (“The Hammer of the Witches”), declaring that witchcraft was indeed real. Witch hysteria began to spread across Europe, taking root in England around the time Peter Bulkeley was born in 1583.

Inscription on marker stone in front of Peter Bulkeley's original homesite

©Jaimee Leigh Joroff

A son of Odell’s Puritan minister, at age 16, Bulkeley entered Saint John’s College at Cambridge, England. Around that time, King James VI of Scotland wrote Daemonology, a manual for hunting and executing witches. Three years later, when Bulkeley was completing his studies, King James inherited the English throne, becoming King James I of England and the VI of Scotland. As a book written by this now powerful King, Daemonology became well known and widely read by audiences that likely included scholars such as Bulkeley. But for Bulkeley, he would soon have a more pressing personal problem than witches at his doorstep.

In 1625, King James I/VI, died. By this time, Bulkeley had ascended his father’s pulpit in Odell and was preaching the rigid Puritan principles. James’ son, King Charles I, ascended the throne. He shortly acquired a Catholic bride, bestowed upon himself religious sovereignty, and suspended parliament. Charles surrounded himself with new additions to the Church of England including William Laud, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Together, Charles and Laud began a campaign of reforms, including instructing ministers to beautify their churches’ physical appearances. Traditional Puritans, like Bulkeley, viewed these changes as wasteful “superstitious vanities”. They were also ordered to wear a surplice (a white overgarment) and perform the sign of the cross, which were viewed as more associated with Catholicism than Puritanism. Bulkeley refused to do both.

In 1634, Bulkeley’s lack of compliance came to the attention of Archbishop Laud who temporarily suspended Bulkeley from his pulpit. If there was a stirring of rage in Bulkeley at this, he would have been wise to feel an equal stirring of fear, for Archbishop Laud was growing increasingly powerful and merciless to Puritans who refused his bidding. Eyeing his future, Bulkeley began to consider relocating, and in the spring of 1635, he boarded the The Susan & Ellen, and with his family motto “Nec temere, nec timide” (Neither rashly, nor timidly) in his mind, set sail for the Colonies. His escape from England was not a moment too soon, for not long after, Archbishop Laud’s cruelty to nonconforming Puritans escalated to the cutting off of ears and branding of faces.

The Susan & Ellen arrived in Boston in the summer of 1635. Bulkeley was introduced to Major Simon Willard, an explorer and fur trader who had been scouting out the inland areas of Massachusetts. Willard had come across Musketaquid, an area 20 miles west of Boston previously lived in by members of the Pennacook tribe. The area had cleared fields and a river, perfect for farming, fishing, and trade passage. Bulkeley, Willard, and several other Colonists petitioned the Massachusetts General Court for permission to settle in Musketaquid and to change the name to “Concord” (meaning “peace”). On September 12, 1635, permission was granted to establish a plantation of six square miles. That fall, with winter fast approaching, Bulkeley, Willard, Reverend John Jones (another Puritan recently driven out of England) and approximately eleven other families moved to Concord and hastily built houses along the area that stretches from today’s Monument Square down Lexington Road to Merriam’s corner. Bulkeley’s house was located on today’s Lowell road (a few doors down from the Colonial Inn).

A year later, Bulkeley and the other Concord residents officially purchased the town from the Pennacook. Early town records are lost, but one story says the treaty was signed under Jethro’s tree (formerly located in Monument Square near the traffic circle); another says the treaty was signed in Bulkeley’s house.

A meeting house was built in the town center and Bulkeley and Jones shared religious duties, with Jones acting as the town’s Reverend, and Bulkeley as the esteemed religious teacher. Jones eventually moved to Connecticut, and Bulkeley assumed the role of Concord’s Reverend.

Bulkeley died on March 9 th , 1659, leaving behind a reputation as one of Massachusetts’ most devout Puritans, and a long line of minister descendants (including his 3 rd -great-nephew, Ralph Waldo Emerson). He also left behind several written works, including The Gospel Covenant derived from his Concord sermons. To his grave in the Old Hill Burying ground he carried the English folklore, superstitions, murmurs of witches, and the memories of kings and zealots who had driven him here. Those stories stayed in the ground with him until 1842 when writer Nathaniel Hawthorne arrived in Concord and set them loose with his pen.

Hawthorne was the great-greatgrandson of another Puritan minister whom history remembers as “the hanging judge” of the Salem Witch trials. In his rented house, the Old Manse on Monument Street, Hawthorne compiled and wrote Mosses from An Old Manse, a collection of short stories steeped in Puritan roots; full of witches, necromancers, shapeshifters, illusions, and fantasies, and the history of Old England and New England. Indeed, Archbishop Laud, the very man who had driven Bulkeley to Concord, later appeared in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter.

We can only guess what Puritan Minister Peter Bulkeley would have thought of Hawthorne’s gothic writing, whose basis sprang more from the pages of Daemonology and The Hammer of the Witches than from Bulkeley’s Gospels of the Covenant. But there was no escaping it, for present in many of Hawthorne’s tales is the figure of the revered Puritan Minister, men like Peter Bulkeley, who followed their unyielding beliefs in whatever land they were destined to inhabit.

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A Concord native, Jaimee is the manager of the Barrow Bookstore in Concord Center which specializes in Concord history, Transcendentalism, and literary figures. She has been an interpreter at most of Concord’s historic sites and is a licensed town guide.