Religious and financial tensions merged during the reign of Charles I to create opposition to both the Anglican Church and the Crown's 1626 forced loan policy, which bypassed Parliament and compelled wealthier subjects to fund England's ongoing wars in France and Spain. The ensuing constitutional crisis led to the imprisonment of seventy-six dissenters without trial and united the gentry and nobles against the Crown. Ultimately, a convergence of like-minded merchants, magistrates, and clergy arose in Boston, Lincolnshire: the "Boston men" who organized the Massachusetts Bay Colony charter.

The Puritan philosophy evolved as Anglicans became dissatisfied with similarities to Catholic worship and sacraments and Charles I's adherence to the faith. The Puritan label evolved because of the dissenters' desire to "purify" or simplify Anglican theology and rituals, bringing them more in line with their Calvinist beliefs. Charles I granted the Massachusetts Bay Company a charter in 1629 but wasn't fully cognizant of the intentions of the mostly Puritan shareholders to create an independent and self-governing church in North America. Some of the most recognizable names today, such as John Winthrop and Thomas Dudley, were not listed in the original charter because they joined the enterprise shortly after the charter was drafted by the Crown courts.

The narrative covers, as extensively as possible, the other patentees and associates involved in the charter, many of whom were Puritans interested in relocating to the Massachusetts Colony despite the heavy death toll that accompanied many migrations of the era. In fact, a dozen shareholders signed the Cambridge Agreement of 1629, a private agreement to emigrate, stipulating that the company's patent, company, and physical charter move with them to the New World. This firmly established the settlers' control of the colony, ensuring that the Crown could not easily interfere with their plans, a subterfuge that masked the self-governing spiritual community as a purely commercial enterprise. The charter then served as a sort of constitution in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Charles I was suspicious of Puritans but eager to expand British territory and establish more trade. The king's reign ended in civil war and his beheading in 1649, a temporary pause in the English monarchy. Though Puritanism also gradually faded in British colonial America over several decades, and the charter was eventually revoked in 1684 and reissued in 1691, the Puritan movement provided legal and political standards of self-governance that influenced the formation of the United States government a century later. In his prologue, Cotton introduces the ten Boston Men who were the first to migrate from Boston, Lincolnshire. "Four of the ten (Bradstreet, Bellingham, Dudley, and Leveret) were repeatedly elected and reelected governor or deputy governor for the fifty-seven years that the Massachusetts Bay Company existed."

The author, a descendant of the seventeenth-century Puritan minister John Cotton, explores, through extensive research and scholarship, the linked history of Boston, Lincolnshire, England, and Boston, Massachusetts Bay Colony, in this timely narrative. While the writing is not always easily accessible to casual readers, it is still an articulate and academically sound narrative that provides ample documentation of primary and secondary source material, some of which hasn't been compiled in a single book before. The lengthy volume contains useful timelines and two detailed appendices in addition to the themed chapters that explore the many historical figures, events, and connections that define the nearly four-hundred-year relationship between Boston, UK, and Boston, USA. It is an exceptional exploration of a form of self-government, part theocracy and part democracy, that transcended England's Crown-Parliamentary system of the day. Cotton's heartfelt narrative brings this fascinating era of American history to life in both a personal and a broader historical examination.

RECOMMENDED by the US Review

A 2026 Eric Hoffer Book Award Category Finalist

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