In the 1590s the separatist martyr-to-be Henry Barrow developed his ideas on church government by dint of an attack on the “constitution” of the Church of England, thereby supplying one of the first known instances in which that word was used to refer not just generically to laws or ordinances but more specifically to a systemic configuration of authority (Stourzh 1988, 39). In the next couple of decades Henry Ainsworth, another English Calvinist known for his separatism, would use the term “constitution” in a similar fashion as he developed his own ecclesiology (40). The colonists who founded New Plymouth in 1620 owned and read books by Barrow and had known and worshiped with Ainsworth in their years of Dutch exile. It is therefore a fact of some interest for the origins of democratic constitutionalism that the so-called Pilgrims and their pastor, John Robinson, subscribed to a radically populist theory of church government, in defense of which they had backed Ainsworth in an important intramural dispute in the English exile church at Amsterdam.

One reason for the relative lack of scholarly interest in the political ideas of the early New England colonies may be a failure to appreciate that, in the minds of seventeenth-century puritans, theories of ecclesiastics were theories of politics. New Englanders recognized important differences between spiritual and temporal forms of power, but they also acknowledged the essential unity of their organizational principles.