Book: The Beginnings of New England

J >> John Fiske >> The Beginnings of New England




In Massachusetts after 1650 the opinion rapidly gained ground that all
baptized persons of upright and decorous lives ought to be considered,
for practical purposes, as members of the church, and therefore entitled
to the exercise of political rights, even though unqualified for
participation in the Lord's Supper. This theory of church-membership,
based on what was at that time stigmatized as the "Halfway Covenant,"
aroused intense opposition. It was the great question of the day. In
1657 a council was held in Boston, which approved the principle of the
Halfway Covenant; and as this decision was far from satisfying the
churches, a synod of all the clergymen in Massachusetts was held five
years later, to reconsider the great question. The decision of the synod
substantially confirmed the decision of the council, but there were some
dissenting voices. Foremost among the dissenters, who wished to retain
the old theocratic regime in all its strictness, was Charles Chauncey,
the president of Harvard College, and Increase Mather agreed with him
at the time, though he afterward saw reason to change his opinion, and
published two tracts in favour of the Halfway Covenant. Most bitter of
all toward the new theory of church-membership was, naturally enough,
Mr. Davenport of New Haven. [Sidenote: The "Halfway Covenant"]

This burning question was the source of angry contentions in the First
Church of Boston. Its teacher, the learned and melancholy Norton, died
in 1663, and four years later the aged pastor, John Wilson, followed
him. In choosing a successor to Wilson the church decided to declare
itself in opposition to the liberal decision of the synod, and in token
thereof invited Davenport to come from New Haven to take charge of it.
Davenport, who was then seventy years old, was disgusted at the recent
annexation of his colony to Connecticut. He accepted the invitation
and came to Boston, against the wishes of nearly half of the Boston
congregation who did not like the illiberal principle which he
represented. In little more than a year his ministry at Boston was ended
by death; but the opposition to his call had already proceeded so far
that a secession from the old church had become inevitable. In 1669
the advocates of the Halfway Covenant organized themselves into a new
society under the title of the "Third Church in Boston." A wooden
meeting-house was built on a lot which had once belonged to the late
governor Winthrop, in what was then the south part of the town, so that
the society and its meeting-house became known as the South Church; and
after a new church founded in Summer Street in 1717 took the name of the
New South, the church of 1669 came to be further distinguished as the
Old South. As this church represented a liberal idea which was growing
in favour with the people, it soon became the most flourishing church
in America. After sixty years its numbers had increased so that the old
meeting-house could not contain them; and in 1729 the famous building
which still stands was erected on the same spot,--a building with a
grander history than any other on the American continent, unless it be
that other plain brick building in Philadelphia where the Declaration of
Independence was adopted and the Federal Constitution framed. [Sidenote:
Founding of the Old South Church, 1669]

The wrath of the First Church at this secession from its ranks was
deep and bitter, and for thirteen years it refused to entertain
ecclesiastical intercourse with the South Church. But by 1682 it had
become apparent that the king and his friends were meditating an attack
upon the Puritan theocracy in New England. It had even been suggested,
in the council for the colonies, that the Church of England should be
established in Massachusetts, and that none but duly ordained Episcopal
clergymen should be allowed to solemnize marriages. Such alarming
suggestions began to impress the various Puritan churches with the
importance of uniting their forces against the common enemy; and
accordingly in 1682 the quarrel between the two Boston societies came to
an end. There was urgent need of all the sympathy and good feeling that
the community could muster, whereby to cheer itself in the crisis that
was coming. The four years from 1684 to 1688 were the darkest years in
the history of New England. Massachusetts, though not lacking in the
spirit, had not the power to beard the tyrant as she did eighty years
later. Her attitude toward the Stuarts--as we have seen--had been
sometimes openly haughty and defiant, sometimes silent and sullen, but
always independent. At the accession of Charles II. the colonists had
thought it worth while to send commissioners to England to confer with
the king and avoid a quarrel. Charles promised to respect their charter,
but insisted that in return they must take an oath of allegiance to the
crown, must administer justice in the king's name, and must repeal their
laws restricting the right of suffrage to church members and prohibiting
the Episcopal form of worship. [Sidenote: Founding of the Old South
Church, 1669] [Sidenote: Demands of Charles II.]

When the people of Massachusetts received this message they consented to
administer justice in the king's name, but all the other matters were
referred for consideration to a committee, and so they dropped out of
sight. When the royal commissioners came to Boston in 1664, they were
especially instructed to ascertain whether Massachusetts had complied
with the king's demands; but upon this point the legislature stubbornly
withheld any definite answer, while it frittered away the time in
trivial altercations with the royal commissioners. The war with Holland
and the turbulent state of English politics operated for several years
in favour of this independent attitude of the colonists, though during
all this time their enemies at court were busy with intrigues and
accusations. Apart from mere slanders the real grounds of complaint
were the restriction of the suffrage, whereby members of the Church of
England were shut out; the claims of the eastern proprietors, heirs
of Mason and Gorges, whose territory Massachusetts had absorbed;
the infraction of the navigation laws; and the coinage of pine-tree
shillings. The last named measure had been forced upon the colonists by
the scarcity of a circulating medium. Until 1661 Indian wampum had been
a legal tender, and far into the eighteenth century it remained current
in small transactions. "In 1693 the ferriage from New York to Brooklyn
was eight stivers in wampum or a silver twopence." [35] As early as
1652 Massachusetts had sought to supply the deficiency by the issue of
shillings and sixpences. It was an affair of convenience and probably
had no political purpose. The infraction of the navigation laws was a
more serious matter. "Ships from France, Spain, and the Canaries traded
directly with Boston, and brought in goods which had never paid duty in
any English port." [36] The effect of this was to excite the jealousy
of the merchants in London and other English cities and to deprive
Massachusetts of the sympathy of that already numerous and powerful
class of people. [Sidenote: Complaints against Massachusetts]

In 1675, the first year of King Philip's War, the British government
made up its mind to attend more closely to the affairs of its American
colonies. It had got the Dutch war off its hands, and could give heed to
other things. The general supervision of the colonies was assigned to
a standing committee of the privy council, styled the "Lords of the
Committee of Trade and Plantations," and henceforth familiarly known
as the "Lords of Trade." Next year the Lords of Trade sent an agent to
Boston, with a letter to Governor Leverett about the Mason and Gorges
claims. Under cover of this errand the messenger was to go about and
ascertain the sentiments which people in the Kennebec and Piscataqua
towns, as well as in Boston, entertained for the government of
Massachusetts. The person to whom this work was entrusted was Edward
Randolph, a cousin of Robert Mason who inherited the property claim to
the Piscataqua county. To these men had old John Mason bequeathed his
deadly feud with Massachusetts, and the fourteen years which Randolph
now spent in New England were busily devoted to sowing the seeds of
strife. In 1678 the king appointed him collector and surveyor of customs
at the port of Boston, with instructions to enforce the navigation laws.
Randolph was not the man to do unpopular things in such a way as to dull
the edge of the infliction; he took delight in adding insult to injury.
He was at once harsh and treacherous. His one virtue was pecuniary
integrity; he was inaccessible to bribes and did not pick and steal from
the receipts at the custom-house. In the other relations of life he
was disencumbered of scruples. His abilities were not great, but his
industry was untiring, and he pursued his enemies with the tenacity of a
sleuth-hound. As an excellent British historian observes, "he was one of
those men who, once enlisted as partisans, lose every other feeling in
the passion which is engendered of strife." [37] [Sidenote: The Lords of
Trade] [Sidenote: Edward Randolph]

The arrival of such a man boded no good to Massachusetts. His reception
at the town-house was a cold one. Leverett liked neither his looks nor
his message, and kept his peaked hat on while he read the letter; when
he came to the signature of the king's chief secretary of state, he
asked, with careless contempt, "Who is this Henry Coventry?" Randolph's
choking rage found vent in a letter to the king, taking pains to remind
him that the governor of Massachusetts had once been an officer in
Cromwell's army. As we read this and think with what ghoulish glee the
writer would have betrayed Colonel Goffe into the hands of the headsman,
had any clue been given him, we can quite understand why Hubbard and
Mather had nothing to say about the mysterious stranger at Hadley.
Everything that Randolph could think of that would goad and irritate the
king, he reported in full to London; his letters were specimens of that
worst sort of lie that is based upon distorted half-truths; and his
malicious pen but seldom lay idle.

While waiting for the effects of these reports to ripen, Randolph was
busily intriguing with some of the leading men in Boston who were
dissatisfied with the policy of the dominant party, and under his
careful handling a party was soon brought into existence which was ready
to counsel submission to the royal will. Such was the birth of Toryism
in New England. The leader of this party was Joseph Dudley, son of
the grim verse-maker who had come over as lieutenant to Winthrop. The
younger Dudley was graduated at Harvard in 1665, and proceeded to study
theology, but soon turned his attention entirely to politics. In 1673 he
was a deputy from Roxbury in the General Court; in 1675 he took part in
the storming of the Narragansett fort; in 1677 and the three following
years he was one of the Federal Commissioners. In character and temper
he differed greatly from his father. Like the proverbial minister's son
whose feet are swift toward folly, Joseph Dudley seems to have learned
in stern bleak years of childhood to rebel against the Puritan theory of
life. Much of the abuse that has been heaped upon him, as a renegade and
traitor, is probably undeserved. It does not appear that he ever made
any pretence of love for the Puritan commonwealth, and there were many
like him who had as lief be ruled by king as by clergy. But it cannot be
denied that his suppleness and sagacity went along with a moral nature
that was weak and vulgar. Joseph Dudley was essentially a self-seeking
politician and courtier, like his famous kinsman of the previous
century, Robert, Earl of Leicester. His party in Massachusetts was
largely made up of men who had come to the colony for commercial
reasons, and had little or no sympathy with the objects for which it was
founded. Among them were Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Baptists, who
were allowed no chance for public worship, as well as many others who,
like Gallio, cared for none of these things. Their numbers, moreover,
must have been large, for Boston had grown to be a town of 5000
inhabitants, the population of Massachusetts was approaching 30,000,
and, according to Hutchinson, scarcely one grown man in five was a
church-member qualified to vote or hold office. Such a fact speaks
volumes as to the change which was coming over the Puritan world. No
wonder that the clergy had begun to preach about the weeds and tares
that were overrunning Christ's pleasant garden. No wonder that the
spirit of revolt against the disfranchising policy of the theocracy was
ripe. [Sidenote: Joseph Dudley]

It was in 1679, when this weakness of the body politic had been duly
studied and reported by Randolph, and when all New England was groaning
under the bereavements and burdens entailed by Philip's war, that the
Stuart government began its final series of assaults upon Massachusetts.
The claims of the eastern proprietors, the heirs of Mason and Gorges,
furnished the occasion. Since 1643 the four Piscataqua towns--Hampton,
Exeter, Dover, and Portsmouth--had remained under the jurisdiction of
Massachusetts. After the Restoration the Mason claim had been revived,
and in 1677 was referred to the chief-justices North and Rainsford.
Their decision was that Mason's claim had always been worthless as based
on a grant in which the old Plymouth Company had exceeded its powers.
They also decided that Massachusetts had no valid claim since the
charter assigned her a boundary just north of the Merrimack. This
decision left the four towns subject to none but the king, who forthwith
in 1679 proceeded to erect them into the royal province of New
Hampshire, with president and council appointed by the crown, and an
assembly chosen by the people, but endowed with little authority,--a
tricksome counterfeit of popular government. Within three years an
arrogant and thieving ruler, Edward Cranfield, had goaded New Hampshire
to acts of insurrection. [Sidenote: Royal province of New Hampshire]

To the decisions of the chief-justices Massachusetts must needs submit.
The Gorges claim led to more serious results. Under Cromwell's rule in
1652--the same year in which she began coining money--Massachusetts
had extended her sway over Maine. In 1665 Colonel Nichols and his
commissioners, acting upon the express instructions of Charles II.,
took it away from her. In 1668, after the commissioners had gone home,
Massachusetts coolly took possession again. In 1677 the chief-justices
decided that the claim of the Gorges family, being based on a grant from
James I., was valid. Then the young Ferdinando Gorges, grandson of the
first proprietor, offered to sell the province to the king, who had now
taken it into his head that he would like to bestow it upon the Duke
of Monmouth, his favourite son by Lucy Walters. Before Charles had
responded, Governor Leverett had struck a bargain with Gorges, who ceded
to Massachusetts all his rights over Maine for L1250 in hard cash. When
the king heard of this transaction he was furious. He sent a letter to
Boston, commanding the General Court to surrender the province again on
repayment of this sum of L1250, and expressing his indignation that
the people should thus dare to dispose of an important claim off-hand
without consulting his wishes. In the same letter the colony was
enjoined to put in force the royal orders of seventeen years before,
concerning the oath of allegiance, the restriction of the suffrage, and
the prohibition of the Episcopal form of worship. [Sidenote: The Gorges
claim]

This peremptory message reached Boston about Christmas, 1679. Leverett,
the sturdy Ironsides, had died six months before, and his place
was filled by Simon Bradstreet, a man of moderate powers but great
integrity, and held in peculiar reverence as the last survivor of those
that had been chosen to office before leaving England by the leaders of
the great Puritan exodus. Born in a Lincolnshire village in 1603, he was
now seventy-six years old. He had taken his degree at Emmanuel College,
Cambridge, had served as secretary to the Earl of Warwick, and in 1629
had been appointed member of the board of assistants for the colony
about to be established on Massachusetts bay. In this position he had
remained with honour for half a century, while he had also served as
Federal Commissioner and as agent for the colony in London. His wife,
who died in 1672, was a woman of quaint learning and quainter verses,
which her contemporaries admired beyond measure. One of her books was
republished in London, with the title: "The Tenth Muse, lately sprung up
in America." John Norton once said that if Virgil could only have heard
the seraphic poems of Anne Bradstreet, he would have thrown his heathen
doggerel into the fire. She was sister of Joseph Dudley, and evidently
inherited this rhyming talent, such as it was, from her father. Governor
Bradstreet belonged to the moderate party who would have been glad to
extend the franchise, but he did not go with his brother-in-law in
subservience to the king. [Sidenote: Simon Bradstreet and his wife]

When the General Court assembled, in May, 1680, the full number of
eighteen assistants appeared, for the first time in the history of the
colony, and in accordance with an expressed wish of the king. They
were ready to yield in trifles, but not in essentials. After wearisome
discussion, the answer to the royal letter was decided on. It stated in
vague and unsatisfactory terms that the royal orders of 1662 either had
been carried out already or would be in good time, while to the demand
for the surrender of Maine no reply whatever was made, save that "they
were heartily sorry that any actings of theirs should be displeasing
to his Majesty." After this, when Randolph wrote home that the king's
letters were of no more account in Massachusetts than an old London
Gazette, he can hardly be accused of stretching the truth. Randolph kept
busily at work, and seems to have persuaded the Bishop of London that
if the charter could be annulled, episcopacy might be established in
Massachusetts as in England. In February, 1682, a letter came from the
king demanding submission and threatening legal proceedings against the
charter. Dudley was then sent as agent to London, and with him was sent
a Mr. Richards, of the extreme clerical party, to watch him. [Sidenote:
Massachusetts answers the king]

Meanwhile the king's position at home had been changing. He had made
up his mind to follow his father's example and try the experiment of
setting his people at defiance and governing without a parliament. This
could not be done without a great supply of money. Louis XIV. had
plenty of money, for there was no constitution in France to prevent his
squeezing what he wanted out of the pockets of an oppressed people.
France was thriving greatly now, for Colbert had introduced a
comparatively free system of trade between the provinces and inaugurated
an era of prosperity soon to be cut short by the expulsion of the
Huguenots. Louis could get money enough for the asking, and would be
delighted to foment civil disturbances in England, so as to tie the
hands of the only power which at that moment could interfere with his
seizing Alsace and Lorraine and invading Flanders. The pretty Louise de
Keroualle Duchess of Portsmouth, with her innocent baby face and heart
as cold as any reptile's, was the French Delilah chosen to shear the
locks of the British Samson. By such means and from such motives a
secret treaty was made in February, 1681, by which Louis agreed to pay
Charles 2,000,000 livres down, and 500,000 more in each of the next two
years, on condition that he should summon no more parliaments within
that time. This bargain for securing the means of overthrowing the laws
and liberties of England was, on the part of Charles II., an act no less
reprehensible than some of those for which his father had gone to the
block. But Charles could now afford for a while to wreak his evil will.
He had already summoned a parliament for the 21st of March, to meet at
Oxford within the precincts of the subservient university, and out of
reach of the high-spirited freemen of London. He now forced a quarrel
with the new parliament and dissolved it within a week. A joiner named
Stephen College, who had spoken his mind too freely in the taverns at
Oxford with regard to these proceedings, was drawn and quartered. The
Whig leader Lord Shaftesbury was obliged to flee to Holland. In the
absence of a parliament the only power of organized resistance to the
king's tyranny resided in the corporate governments of the chartered
towns. The charter of London was accordingly attacked by a writ of
_quo warranto_, and in June, 1683, the time-serving judges declared it
confiscated. George Jeffreys, a low drunken fellow whom Charles had made
Lord Chief Justice, went on a circuit through the country; and, as Roger
North says, "made all the charters, like the walls of Jericho, fall down
before him, and returned laden with surrenders, the spoils of towns."
At the same time a terrible blow was dealt at two of the greatest Whig
families in England. Lord William Russell, son of the Earl of Bedford,
and Algernon Sidney, younger son of the Earl of Leicester, two of the
purest patriots and ablest liberal leaders of the day, were tried on a
false charge of treason and beheaded. [Sidenote: Secret treaty between
Charles II. and Louis XIV] [Sidenote: Shameful proceedings in England]

By this quick succession of high-handed measures, the friends of law and
liberty were for a moment disconcerted and paralyzed. In the frightful
abasement of the courts of justice which these events so clearly showed,
the freedom of Englishmen seemed threatened in its last stronghold. The
doctrine of passive obedience to monarchs was preached in the pulpits
and inculcated by the university of Oxford, which ordered the works of
John Milton to be publicly burned. Sir Robert Filmer wrote that "not
only in human laws, but even in divine, a thing may by the king be
commanded contrary to law, and yet obedience to such a command is
necessary." Charles felt so strong that in 1684 he flatly refused to
summon a parliament.

It was not long before the effects of all this were felt in New England.
The mission of Dudley and his colleague was fruitless. They returned to
Boston, and Randolph, who had followed them to London, now followed them
back, armed with a writ of _quo warranto_ which he was instructed not to
serve until he should have given Massachusetts one more chance to humble
herself in the dust. Should she modify her constitution to please a
tyrant or see it trampled under foot? Recent events in England served
for a solemn warning; for the moment the Tories were silenced; perhaps
after all, the absolute rule of a king was hardly to be preferred to the
sway of the Puritan clergy; the day when the House of Commons sat still
and wept seemed to have returned. A great town-meeting was held in the
Old South Meeting-House, and the moderator requested all who were for
surrendering the charter to hold up their hands. Not a hand was lifted,
and out from the throng a solitary voice exclaimed, with deep-drawn
breath, "The Lord be praised!" Then arose Increase Mather, president
of Harvard College, and reminded them how their fathers did win this
charter, and should they deliver it up unto the spoiler who demanded it
"even as Ahab required Naboth's vineyard, Oh! their children would be
bound to curse them." Such was the attitude of Massachusetts, and when
it was known in London, the blow was struck. For technical reasons
Randolph's writ was not served; but on the 21st of June a decree in
chancery annulled the charter of Massachusetts. [Sidenote: Massachusetts
refuses to surrender her charter] [Sidenote: It is annulled by degree of
chancery, June 21, 1684]

To appreciate the force of this blow we must pause for a moment and
consider what it involved. The right to the soil of North America had
been hitherto regarded in England, on the strength of the discoveries of
the Cabots, as an appurtenance to the crown of Henry VII.,--as something
which descended from father to son like the palace at Hampton Court or
the castle at Windsor, but which the sovereign might alienate by his
voluntary act just as he might sell or give away a piece of his royal
domain in England. Over this vast territory it was doubtful how far
Parliament was entitled to exercise authority, and the rights of
Englishmen settled there had theoretically no security save in the
provisions of the various charters by which the crown had delegated its
authority to individual proprietors or to private companies. It was thus
on the charter granted by Charles I. to the Company of Massachusetts Bay
that not only the cherished political and ecclesiastical institutions
of the colony, but even the titles of individuals to their lands and
houses, were supposed to be founded. By the abrogation of the charter,
all rights and immunities that had been based upon it were at once swept
away, and every rood of the soil of Massachusetts became the personal
property of the Stuart king, who might, if he should possess the will
and the power, turn out all the present occupants or otherwise deal with
them as trespassers. Such at least was the theory of Charles II., and
to show that he meant to wreak his vengeance with no gentle hand, he
appointed as his viceroy the brutal Percy Kirke,--a man who would have
no scruples about hanging a few citizens without trial, should occasion
require it. [Sidenote: Effect of annulling the charter]

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