John Cotton — the architect of the New England Way, and its prosecutor.
The most influential minister in early Massachusetts, whose writing set out congregational government as a complete system. He also drove the banishment of Roger Williams in 1635 and turned on Anne Hutchinson in 1637 after having encouraged her, and defended the colony's right to expel dissenters.
Cotton arrived in Boston in 1633 already the most celebrated Puritan preacher in England, having conformed for twenty years at Boston in Lincolnshire while quietly not using the surplice. In Massachusetts he became the theorist of the New England Way, and his positions are inseparable from its coercion: he wrote against Roger Williams that the magistrate must punish heresy, and Williams answered in The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution in 1644, one of the founding texts of religious liberty in English. In the Antinomian Controversy of 1636-38, Anne Hutchinson held meetings in her house expounding Cotton's own emphasis on free grace; when the colony moved against her, Cotton distanced himself and testified against her, and she was banished. Congregational historians have not tried to soften this: the polity that made the congregation free also made the colony a closed corporation.
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