From the most obnoxious to the least troublesome — George Moxon, a farmer’s son, born in Wakefield, whose entry in Sidney’s Admissions Register (MR. 30) reads:
Georgius Moxon Eboracensis filius Jacobi Moxon agricolae, natus in paroecia de Wakefield, educatus ibidem in publico literaru[m] ludo sub praeceptore Mro. Izack per annu[m] adolescens annu[m] aetatis agens decimu[m] octauu[m]: admissus est in Collegium pauper scholaris Junij 6. 1620. Tutore & fideiussore Mro. Bell. (159)
According to Venn (pt.1, III, 225), he received his B.A. in 1624, was ordained in 1626 and appointed to the perpetual curacy of St Helen’s, Chester. Perpetual was a respectable dozen years; not until 1637 was he cited for nonconformity over disuse of the ceremonies, and he lost no time embarking from Bristol in disguise. He turned up in Dorchester, near Boston, the same year. Here Moxon was admitted as a freeman on 7 September.46 Very soon thereafter, William Pynchon, the founder of the trading post in Springfield, then called Agawam, must have persuaded Moxon to join his year-old Puritan settlement and spread the gospel in the Wild West of Massachusetts. He arrived early in 1638 “at the season of general thanksgiving through New England at the overthrow of the Pequots.” By “the spring of 1638 it had been voted that the expenses of fencing his home-lot on the main street and of building his house should fall upon those who might join the plantation thereafter.”47 From then on, until Moxon’s return to England in 1652, one hears nothing but his praises sung. His “sermons were of love,” if on the curiously
46 A. G. Matthews, Calamy Revised[,] Being a Revision of Edmund Calamy’s Account of the Ministers and Others Ejected and Silenced, 1660–2 (Oxford, 1934), 359.There is a brief account of Moxon’s career in James Moxon, The Moxons of Yorkshire (Ludlow, Shrops., 1987), 20–21, 91–93. My own account is based on the sources indicated.
47 Mason A. Green, Springfield, 1636–1886: History of Town and City: Including an Account of the Quarter-millennial Celebration at Springfield, Mass., May 25 and 26, 1886 (Springfield, MA, 1888), 17, 43, https://archive.org/details/springfield1888gree
pragmatic ground that “we are in a new country, and here we must be happy, for if we are not happy ourselves we cannot make others happy.”48 “Others” do not seem to have included the Indians, though, for the Rev. Moxon is on record as having opined that an Indian promise is “noe more than to have a pigg by the taile.”49 With this exception, his charity was boundless, for in his sermons he would cover “about all that could be said upon his subject, dividing and subdividing his topic with reckless prodigality of time”—with the then predictable result that, as Pynchon wrote to Governor Winthrop in 1644, “the Lord has greately blessed mr. Moxons ministry.”50 And to this day the man who brought such happiness remains fixed in local memory as he was described in a poetical portrait written shortly after his return to England:
As thou with strong and able parts are made, The person stout, with toyle and labor shall, With help of Christ, through difficulties wade.51
He did have difficulties in Western Massachusetts. In part they were of this world, such as the suit for unspecified slander brought by Moxon against one John Woodcock in December 1639, in which he demanded
£9 19s in damages and, with three of his witnesses sitting on the jury, due to the scarcity of upright citizens in what was then “the interior,”
got no more than £6 13s 4d, even though Woodcock declared that he was ready to repeat the offence.52 Spiritual malaise erupted when both of Moxon’s daughters started having “fits,” which suggested traffic with the devil. While tiny, the outpost was large enough to have a male witch in residence: Hugh Parsons, he of the red coat, who was tried for witchcraft in Boston in 1651 along with his wife, Mary. Still, by this time Moxon was well enough ensconced spiritually to weather the storm. A forty-foot-long meeting house had been built for his congregation in 1645, and the following year “it was agreed with John Matthews to beat
48 Harry Andrew Wright, The Story of Western Massachusetts (New York, 1949), I, 134.
49 Green, 26.
50 Green, 76–77; Winthrop Papers, IV (1944), 443.
51 First Church of Christ 1637–1937, published by The Three Hundredth Anniversary Committee, Springfield, Massachusetts, 1937, section entitled “The Church and Its Ministers.” There is a commemorative article on Moxon in the Springfield Union of 11 May 1987 where he is made out to have been “as popular with English monarchs as a Marxist might be with Ronald Reagan” (13). This is meant to be praise.
52 Green, 53.
the drum for the meetings at 10 of the clock on lecture days and at 9 of the clock on the Lord’s days, in the forenoon only, from Mr. Moxon’s to Rowland Stebins — from near Vernon Street to Union Street, and for which ‘he is to have 6 pence in wampum, of every family, or a pick of Indian corn, if they have not wampum.’”53
Real — and that meant doctrinal in Massachusetts at the time
— “difficulty” did however loom large at about the time when the Parsons were tried for witchcraft in Boston. Moxon’s sponsor and mentor, the local squire William Pynchon, no mean theologian himself, had published a book in 1650 entitled The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption, Justification, etc. The General Court of Massachusetts had the book burned as heretical and directed the author to appear at its next meeting, 14 October 1651, to retract his errors. Pynchon and his wife left the colony instead, sometime in 1652. “With them went the Reverend George Moxon [whose Puritan orthodoxy had been officially suspect to Boston divines as early as 1649]54 who, as Pynchon’s sympathizer and spiritual adviser, must have known that his turn to be questioned, censured, and ejected would come next.”55
Moxon’s afterlife in England was auspicious at first: he shared the Rectory of Astbury, Cheshire, with one George Machin and was made Assistant Commissioner to the “Triers,” the examining board for prospective ministers appointed by Cromwell to make sure that candidates did not encourage dancing or playacting, or speak irreverently of Puritans.56 His luck did not outlast the Commonwealth by long, however. When the Act of Uniformity was passed in 1662, Moxon was removed from his post. The once popular minister was now reduced to preaching in barns and farmhouses. But there must have been consolation in the fact that he lived to see James II’s declaration of liberty of conscience, though he did not live to inaugurate the meeting house built for his congregation at Congleton, in the parish of Astbury.
53 Henry M. Burt, The First Century of the History of Springfield: The Official Records from 1636 to 1736, with an Historical Review and Biographical Mention of the Founders, I (Springfield, MA, 1898), 144–145, https://archive.org/details/firstcenturyofhi01spri 54 See the document reprinted in Green, 111.
55 Samuel Eliot Morison, Builders of the Bay Colony (Boston, 1964), 374.
56 J. E. Gordon Cartlidge, Newbold-Astbury and Its History (Congleton, 1915), 90.