Cotton, John (4 Dec. 1584-23 Dec. 1652), clergyman, was born in Derby, Derbyshire, England, the son of Roland Cotton, a lawyer, and Mary Hurlbert. A serious and talented student, he matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge, at the age of thirteen. He received his B.A. in 1603 and his M.A. in 1606, the year he became a fellow at Emmanuel College. He remained there until 1612, serving as lecturer, catechist, dean, and tutor while acquiring a reputation as both an able disputant and a remarkable preacher. At first his preaching was in the learned and ornate style, but after being spiritually affected in 1609 by the preaching of Richard Sibbes, he adopted the plain Puritan style. Although this change was received with dismay by many of his admirers in Cambridge, it was responsible for the conversion of John Preston, later master of Emmanuel and an eminent Puritan divine. Cotton was ordained in 1610, and in 1613 he received the B.D. His first call was as vicar of St. Botolph's Church in Boston, Lincolnshire, where he served from 1612 until shortly before his departure for New England in 1633. In 1613 Cotton married Elizabeth Horrocks, sister of a Lancashire minister. During his Lincolnshire ministry, Cotton ran an informal seminary for recent Cambridge graduates. Young Dutch and German exiles from the war on the Continent also lived with the Cottons, so that, as his contemporary John Norton noted, Cotton "had his house full of Auditors." Although an opposing faction disapproved of his strict Calvinist beliefs and Puritan practice, he became notable among his fellow Puritans for his ability to avoid stern ecclesiastical punishment despite his nonconformity in prescribed forms of worship, such as making the sign of the cross, wearing the surplice, and kneeling to receive communion. Cotton endured temporary suspensions by successive bishops in 1615 and early 1621, but the protection of influential citizens such as the Boston alderman Thomas Leverett, together with Cotton's own posture as an earnest seeker after God's truth, led each time to his restoration. Samuel Ward, a well-known Cambridge Puritan, said he envied Cotton above all others "for he does nothing in the way of conformity, and yet hath his liberty, and I do everything that way, and cannot enjoy mine."

By the end of the decade, Cotton's ministry was increasingly threatened, partly because his shield, Bishop John Williams, was not well liked by King Charles. Cotton's early interest in New England colonization was signaled by his Southampton departure sermon, Gods Promise to His Plantation (1630), to the founding émigrés of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, led by John Winthrop. The end of Cotton's Lincolnshire ministry may have been delayed by a long bout of ague in 1630-1631. In April 1631 Cotton's wife died, after a childless marriage of eighteen years. Cotton married Sarah Hawkredd Story, widow of William Story, in April 1632. They had six children. One daughter, Maria, married Increase Mather and became the mother of Cotton Mather.

Though he had friends among the titled gentry, they were no longer able to protect him from the increasing ecclesiastical pressure to conform. He went into hiding in the fall of 1632 and was temporarily separated from his new wife and her ten-year-old daughter, Elizabeth. Reunited before the end of the year, they were concealed by Puritan friends, including John Dod. Early in 1633 Cotton was cited to appear before the Court of High Commission. During this period, Cotton is said to have converted John Davenport, Thomas Goodwin, Philip Nye, and Henry Whitfield to nonconformity. On 7 May 1633 Cotton resigned his vicarage in Boston, regretting that "neither my bodily health, nor the peace of the church will now stand with my continuance there." The crucial issue of conformity had been the central factor, as he explained to Bishop Williams: "howsoever I doe highly prize and much prefer other mens judgment and learning, and wisdome, and piety, yet in thinges pertaining to God and his worship, still, I must (as I ought) live by mine own fayth, not theirs." Along with Puritan ministers Thomas Hooker and Samuel Stone and their families, Cotton sailed for New England on the Griffin on 13 July 1633. During the voyage, Sarah delivered their first child, aptly named Seaborn Cotton.

Although Cotton, who arrived at the new Boston in September, was well established as an intellectual and spiritual leader of the Puritan movement, his career as a published author lay ahead of him. In the years following emigration, his writings began to be published, especially in the 1640s as the Puritans gained positions of authority in church, university, and state. His sermons retained an audience in old as well as New England. Early sermon series appeared as The Way of Life (1641), A Brief Exposition of the Whole Book of Canticles (1642), Christ the Fountain of Life (1651), A Brief Exposition . . . of Ecclesiastes (1654), and A Practical Commentary . . . upon the First Epistle Generall of John (1656). Works written and preached by Cotton in New England included An Exposition upon the Thirteenth Chapter of the Revelation (1655) and The Powring Out of the Seven Vials (1642), both millennialist and vehemently anti-Catholic works. As was common with popular preachers of this era, Cotton's sermons were often taken down in shorthand or other abbreviated form by auditors whose notes were later published without the author's knowledge or permission.

Soon after arriving in Boston, Cotton was chosen teacher of the first church in Boston, of which John Wilson was already pastor. Cotton thus enjoyed a prominent position in the only church in what was to become the principal town of New England. His reputation for piety, learning, and insight, together with the respect paid to the minister in a community based on a desire to worship "in the purity of the ordinances," gave him immediate influence. He was therefore in an uncomfortable and unaccustomed position when he sided with those accused of "antinomianism" in the years 1636-1638. John Wheelwright, a Lincolnshire minister who had arrived after Cotton; Anne Hutchinson, Wheelwright's sister-in-law and a Lincolnshire follower of Cotton who led discussions in her home at which she presented a theology of "free grace"; and Henry Vane, a gentleman who lived in Cotton's house and was elected governor of the colony for one year, 1636-1637, led numerous followers in Boston's first church in dismissing the importance of good works as primary evidence of saving faith while emphasizing the belief that an individual's access to God's grace is direct, thus minimizing the role of the minister as the mediator between the sinner and God's mercy. Wheelwright and Cotton were opposed by most of the clergy in the colony, including especially Wilson, Hooker, Thomas Shepard, and Peter Bulkeley, as well as the magistrates and sometime governors John Winthrop and Thomas Dudley. Cotton's thoughts on the central issue appear in his sermons in The New Covenant (1654) and its longer version, A Treatise of the Covenant of Grace (1659). His retrospective construction of the controversy is in The Way of Congregational Churches Cleared (1648), a response to the Scottish churchman Robert Baillie's anti-Congregationalist attack in A Dissuasive against the Errours of the Time (1645). During a 1637 synod, Cotton became aware that the antinomian faction, while claiming him as their chief authority, held opinions that were "blasphemous: some of them, heretical, many of them erroneous." He distanced himself from Hutchinson and Wheelwright, both of whom were exiled from the colony following court trials during 1637 and 1638. Correspondence as late as 1640 shows Cotton still trying to persuade Wheelwright to soften his outspoken charges that ministers and magistrates overemphasized works at the expense of grace and to admit that he did "overvalue . . . an heretical and seditious faction." It was a period of unaccustomed agitation that put Cotton in the minority and on the defensive in the area in which he had been assumed to be a preeminent authority--the life of the spirit.

He eventually recovered from his sense of personal loss and pain to resume a position as key spokesman for the New England polity. In the 1640s many in England wrote to New England asking for clear statements on church practice, often implying or stating disagreement with what they saw as overly strict requirements for membership in New England churches. Cotton himself had opposed the separatism of Roger Williams, who was banished from the colony in 1635. These two strongly principled men engaged in a debate about toleration and conscience known as the "Bloody Tenent Controversy," named after the chief published products of the debate, Williams's The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution (1644), Cotton's reply, The Bloudy Tenent, Washed and Made White in the Bloud of the Lamb (1647), and Williams's final rejoinder, The Bloody Tenent Yet More Bloody (1652). In this involved and protracted debate, Cotton argued that when a dissenter publicly disagrees with generally held views of the community, it is sometimes necessary that the dissenter be punished, as Williams was.

Along with John Davenport and Thomas Hooker, Cotton was invited by members of Parliament to return to London to represent New England in the Westminster Assembly, an invitation all three declined. Cotton did help to define what became known as the New England Way. Although Cotton's draft, The Keyes of the Kingdom of Heaven (1644), saw several printings, it was his The Way of the Churches of Christ in New-England (1645) that he wanted to represent his views. While this work and The Grounds and Ends of the Baptisme of the Children of the Faithfull (1647) were meant to satisfy the inquiries of brethren in his "native countrey" about New England church practice, he wrote also for his neighbors in their everyday lives, including his catechism for children called Milk for Babes: Drawn Out of the Breasts of Both Testaments (1646) and Singing of Psalmes a Gospel-Ordinance (1647). The latter remains the chief statement on the use of the psalms in worship by a Puritan of his generation. He also had a major role in the translation of the psalms by several New England ministers, which produced the Bay Psalm Book (1640), the first book published in America.

Cotton corresponded with a wide array of contemporaries. Although only a small portion has survived--about one hundred letters to and by Cotton--we know of many other letters through his own and his contemporaries' references to them. He sometimes complained of having his time and energies sapped by his multiple duties, including his need to reply to many letters. He wrote that it is "a foolish conceit of ignorant people, that think Ministers and Schollers eat the bread of idleness" or "come easily by their living. No calling more wasteth and grieveth him that is occupied therein, then theirs doth" (A Brief Exposition of . . . Ecclesiastes, p. 33).

Cotton's death in Boston acquired mythological status by being associated with a comet that appeared in early December and disappeared shortly after his death. One of his earliest biographers calls the comet a "monitory Apparition" and says that Cotton himself, when asked about it on his deathbed, "thought it portended great changes in the churches" (Norton, pp. 47, 48).

Cotton was one of the most influential leaders of the Puritan movement in England and in the first generation of New England's settlement. He brought a scholar's erudition to his practice as preacher, biblical interpreter, disputant, and analyst of spiritual experience.
 

Bibliography

Cotton manuscript items, chiefly letters, are in the Boston Public Library, the Massachusetts State Archives, the Massachusetts Historical Society, Pilgrim Hall in Plymouth, Mass., the New England Historic Genealogical Society, the American Antiquarian Society, the Hawthorne-Longfellow Library at Bowdoin College, the Bodleian Library, the British Library, and the Gemeente Archief, Leyden, the Netherlands. Additional important works include A Letter of Mr. John Cottons . . . to Mr. Williams (1643), The Controversie Concerning Liberty of Conscience in Matters of Religion (1646), and Of the Holinesse of Church-Members (1650). Several writings appear in David D. Hall, ed., The Antinomian Controversy, 1636-1638: A Documentary History (1968; rev. ed. 1990). Three books are printed in modern format in Larzer Ziff, ed., John Cotton on the Churches of New England (1968). For complete primary bibliographies, see Julius H. Tuttle, "The Writings of Rev. John Cotton," in Bibliographical Essays: A Tribute to Wilberforce Eames (1924), and Everett Emerson, John Cotton, 2d ed. (1990), which gives known or estimated dates of composition. For a thorough listing of works on Cotton up to 1975, see Edward J. Gallagher and Thomas Werge, Early Puritan Writers: A Reference Guide (1976), pp. 59-97. The most complete treatment of his life is Ziff, The Career of John Cotton: Puritanism and the American Experience (1962), though three early biographies are indispensable: Samuel Whiting, "Concerning the Life of the Famous Mr. Cotton. . . . ," in Chronicles of the First Planters of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, from 1623 to 1636, ed. Alexander Young (1846), John Norton, Abel Being Dead yet Speaketh; or, The Life & Death of . . . John Cotton (1658), and Cotton Mather, "Cottonus Redivivus," in bk. 3 of Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), first published in Johannes in Eremo (1695). Sargent Bush has provided "John Cotton's Correspondence: A Census," Early American Literature 24 (1989): 91-111, anticipating his edition of the letters. See also William K. B. Stoever, "A Faire and Easie Way to Heaven": Covenant Theology and Antinomianism in Early Massachusetts (1978), for discussion of Cotton's theology as it relates to the antinomian controversy. Darrett B. Rutman, Winthrop's Boston: A Portrait of a Puritan Town, 1630-1649 (1965), contains much that is relevant to Cotton's New England career. On his relation to the Puritan movement in England, see Bush, "Epistolary Counseling in the Puritan Movement: The Example of John Cotton," in Puritanism: Transatlantic Perspectives on a Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Faith, ed. Francis J. Bremer (1993). On the Williams-Cotton controversy, see Jesper Rosenmeier, "The Teacher and the Witness: John Cotton and Roger Williams," William and Mary Quarterly 25 (1968): 408-31; Sacvan Bercovitch, "Typology in Puritan New England: The Williams-Cotton Controversy Reassessed," American Quarterly 19 (1967): 166-91; and Irwin H. Polishook, Roger Williams, John Cotton and Religious Freedom: A Controversy in New and Old England (1967). Valuable chapters on Cotton's thought appear in Teresa Toulouse, The Art of Prophesying: New England Sermons and the Shaping of Belief (1987), and Theodore Dwight Bozeman, To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension in Puritanism (1988).

Sargent Bush