St. Botolph’s and a Tale of Two Bostons

Published Tuesday, March 18, 2008 in British Heritage  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

The lantern of St. Botolph’s Church, Boston, has been shining miles across the fens of southern Lincolnshire for a long time. When work began on the church in 1309, the southern Lincolnshire port town on the Wash was among the busiest and wealthiest commercial towns in England. Every year, the finest wool in Europe from the backs of 3 million sheep passed through the port to the Continent. The town’s burghers and guilds were determined to design a church fitting their provincial importance.

The result is the largest building in England that always has been a parish church. By the time the church was largely complete in 1390, however, Boston’s fortunes had changed. Larger ships and ports and a silting river were unhappily rendering the proud town a backwater. Nonetheless, Boston would have its statement to the world. In 1425 work began on the church tower that would take another 90 years to complete. The highest tower of any parish church in England at 272 feet, the squat appearance of its 15th-century perpendicular architecture is the likely source of the building’s nickname, The Stump.

Though the church itself is getting ready to celebrate its 700th anniversary in 2009, it was back in the 7th century that St. Bo­tolph brought the gospel to these parts. The town, as well as the church, takes its name from the Saxon missionary monk who built a monastery nearby. The place that was first called Botolph’s Stone became shortened over the centuries to Boston. Today, Boston is a bustling market town of 36,000. Though there is still some exporting industry in town, it serves primarily as a commercial hub for miles of market gardens spreading across the rich, alluvial soil of the fens in all directions.

From the middle of the 16th century, when Henry VIII first began the process that became the English Reformation, Boston gradually became a Puritan town. Protestants exiled to the Continent under the reign of Bloody Mary Tudor returned when her sister Elizabeth became queen, intent upon “purifying” the Church of England of its papist doctrine and worship. Among these returning exiles was Boston-born John Fox, whose Book of Martyrs became the most widely read book in England after the Bible.

In 1612 the town councilors called the radical young Cambridge cleric John Cotton to be the vicar of St. Botolph’s. Charismatic and knowledgeable, the Emmanual College-educated Cotton became over the next 15 years perhaps the preeminent Puritan theologian in the country. Cotton drew crowds from town and far beyond, who stood in St. Botolph’s nave throughout his legendary three-hour sermons. The pulpit raised in the church for John Cotton in 1612 is still in use today. When Archbishop Laud chastised Cotton for serving the sacrament to folk standing instead of kneeling, Cotton replied there was no room for people to kneel.

Not merely did people travel many miles to hear Cotton, but a number of significant gentry families relocated to Boston specifically to be part of his congregation. Unofficial notoriety, however, brought with it official hostility in the early turbulent years of the Stuart monarchy. Church leaders with the backing of the king tried unsuccessfully to quell the dissent of Puritans and Separatists through­out the kingdom.

As the high-profile position of Boston’s Puritans brought the community into some peril, its leaders took an interest in the fledgling Massachusetts Bay Company, being promoted by the family of the Earl of Lincoln. In 1629 the church became the focus of plans to settle a colony in the New World. Leading Boston laymen Thomas Dudley, Simon Bradstreet and William Coddington became active in the plans. With financial support of the Earl of Lincoln and wealthy families of St. Botolph’s parish, in the spring of 1630 a flotilla of seven ships was ready to take the first wave of 1,000 emi­grants to a new colony in the new world.

Members of St. Botolph’s church were prominent among those who set sail for Massachusetts Bay in April 1630, under their chosen leader John Winthrop on the Arbella, named for the daughter of Earl of Lincoln, who was aboard with her husband. Winthrop’s address to the colonists on Arbella has become famous: “We shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.” Their pastor, John Cotton, preached a farewell sermon just a few days before the small convoy sailed from Yarmouth.