Spirited Away: Childhood, Transatlantic Transportation, and the Politics of Religious Instruction in Civil War England

Abstract

Employing a combination of new manuscript materials and familiar printed sources, this article traces a series of anti-puritan libels deployed by royalist polemicists against puritan parliamentarians during England’s mid-seventeenth-century civil wars. The chief target of those accusations was the returned New England minister Hugh Peter, whose charitable efforts to transport young, orphaned Londoners to Massachusetts Bay during the early months of 1643 were recast by Charles I’s royalist writers into a conspiracy theory that centered on the threat to king, church, and state of godly miseducation in faraway New England. The article thus unpacks this royalist fixation on malevolent godly spiritual instruction for the first time, both as it percolated in loyalist print throughout the 1640s and into the Restoration, while also contributing to existing scholarship on the histories of childhood, labor, and the British Atlantic world.