Henry Vane The Younger - New England

New England

Vane left for the Massachusetts Bay Colony, arriving in Boston in October 1635 on a ship also carrying John Winthrop the Younger and Hugh Peter. The elder John Winthrop described Vane as "a young gentleman of excellent parts", and by the following month he had already been admitted as a freeman in the colony. He began playing a role in its judicial administration, deciding whether legal disputes had sufficient merit to be heard by a full court. Vane was instrumental in brokering the resolution to a dispute between the elder Winthrop and Thomas Dudley concerning matters of judicial conduct. In the spring of 1637 Vane was elected governor of the colony, succeeding John Haynes. The situation he faced was complex, with issues on religious, political and military fronts. His biographers describe his term in office as "disastrous".

The colony was split over the actions and beliefs of Anne Hutchinson. She had come with her husband and children to the colony in 1634, and began holding Bible sessions at home, gaining a wide audience and sharing her opinions that the colonial leaders labeled as Antinomianism, the view that existing laws and practices were not necessary for salvation. Most of the older colonial leadership, including Dudley and Winthrop, espoused a more Legalist view. Vane was a supporter of Hutchinson, as was at first the influential pastor John Cotton, and this was the faction that propelled Vane into the governor's seat in 1636. Vane, however, immediately alienated some of the colonists by insisting on flying the English flag over Boston's fort. The flag had recently been the subject of controversy, since its depiction of the Cross of St George was seen by many colonists as a symbol of papacy, and John Endecott had notoriously cut the cross out of the Salem militia's flag. Vane's popularity went down further when he learned in December 1636 that there were issues in England requiring his presence, and he attempted to resign. Although the court of assistants accepted his resignation, he withdrew it upon the request of the congregation of the Boston church.

During Vane's tenure a dispute with the Pequot tribe of present-day southeastern Connecticut boiled over into war. In 1636 the boat of a Massachusetts trader named John Oldham was found near Block Island, overrun by Indians. Further examination by the discoverers (after the Indians fled in canoes) uncovered Oldham's body on board. The attackers were at the time believed to be from tribes affiliated with the Narragansetts, but Narragansett leaders claimed that those responsible had fled to the protection of the Pequots. The Pequots were aggressively expansionist in their dealings with the surrounding native tribes (including the Narragansett), but had until then generally kept the peace with nearby English colonists. Massachusetts authorities were already angry that the Pequots had failed to turn over men implicated in the killing of another trader on the Connecticut River; the slaying of Oldham led to calls for action. Despite the fact that Roger Williams had warned him that the Narragansetts were more likely responsible for Oldham's slaying, Governor Vane in August 1636 placed John Endecott at the head of a 90 man force to extract justice from the Pequots. Endecott's heavy-handed expedition did little more than destroy Pequot settlements, and sparked a military backlash. The Pequots struck back at settlements recently established on the Connecticut River by colonists from Massachusetts, and at the Saybrook Colony of the younger John Winthrop. In April 1637 the ostensibly pacifist Vane called a session of the general court that authorized the colonial militia to assist the other New England colonies in continuing the war, which resulted in the destruction of the Pequots as a tribal entity.

Vane lost his position to the elder John Winthrop in the 1637 election. The contentious election was marked by a sharp disagreement over the treatment of John Wheelwright, another Hutchinson supporter. Winthrop won in part because the location of the vote was moved to Cambridge, reducing the power of Vane's Boston support. In the aftermath of the election Anne Hutchinson was put on trial, and eventually banished from the colony. Many of her followers seriously considered leaving after the election. At the urging of Roger Williams, some of these people, including Hutchinson, founded the settlement of Portsmouth on Aquidneck Island in the Narragansett Bay (later named Rhode Island and joined to Providence to form the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations). Vane decided to return to England, apparently with the notion that he would acquire a royal governorship to trump the colonial administration. Before his departure, he published A Brief Answer to a Certain Declaration, a response to Winthrop's defense of the Act of Exclusion; this act was passed after the election to restrict the immigration of people with views not conforming to the colony's religious orthodoxy.

Despite their political differences, Vane and Winthrop developed an epistolary relationship in the following years. Vane's legacy from his time in the New World includes the colonial legislation appropriating £400 for the establishment of an institute of higher learning now known as Harvard University, and his support of Roger Williams in the acquisition of Aquidneck Island from the local Indians that resulted in the formal beginnings of Rhode Island. The surviving accounts do not say that Vane provide the funds for the acquisition; Williams credits Vane as being "an instrument in the hand of God for procuring this island".

According to historian Michael Winship, Vane's experiences in Massachusetts significantly radicalized his religious views, in which he came to believe that clergy of all types, including Puritan ministers, "were the second beast of Revelations 13:11", "pretending to visible Saintship". This conviction drove his political activities in England, where he sought to minimize the power and influence of all types of clergy. Biographer Violet Rowe writes that "Vane's guiding principles in religious policy seem to have been two: a rooted distrust of clerical power, whether of bishops or presbyters, and a belief that the State should abstain from interference in church matters altogether."

Vane's stance can be seen in the way the first Rhode Island patent was drafted in 1643, when he sat on the Parliamentary committee charged with colonial affairs. Unique among all of the early English colonial charters, it contains provisions guaranteeing freedom of religion. (Vane assisted Roger Williams again in 1652, when the latter sought a confirmation of the Rhode Island charter and the revocation of a conflicting charter that had been issued to William Coddington.)