England in America, 1580-1652 Part 17

This exodus of so many of the best, "both ministers and Christians,"[19] aroused the king and Archbishop Laud to the danger threatened by the Ma.s.sachusetts colony. Gorges, Mason, and the rest renewed the attack, and in February, 1634, an order was obtained from the Privy Council for the detention of ten vessels bound for Ma.s.sachusetts. At the same time Cradock, the ex-governor of the company, was commanded by the Privy Council to hand in the Ma.s.sachusetts charter.[20] Soon after, the king announced his intention of "giving order for a general governor" for New England; and in April, 1634, he appointed a new commission for the government of the colonies, called "The Commission for Foreign Plantations," with William Laud, archbishop of Canterbury, at the head. Mr. Cradock transmitted a copy of the order of council, requiring a production of the charter, to Boston, where it was received by Governor Dudley in July, 1634.

This was a momentous crisis in the history of the colony. The governor and a.s.sistants made answer to Mr. Cradock that the charter could not be returned except by command of the general court, not then in session. At the same time orders were given for fortifying Castle Island, Dorchester, and Charlestown. In this moment of excitement the figure of Endicott again dramatically crosses the stage of history.

Conceiving an intense dislike to the cross in the English flag, he denounced it as antichrist, and cut it out with his own hands from the ensign borne by the company at Salem. Endicott was censured by the general court for the act, but soon the cross was left out of all the flags except that of the fort at Castle Island, in Boston Harbor.[21]

Ma.s.sachusetts, while taking these bold measures at home, did not neglect the protection of her interests in England. The government of Plymouth, in July, 1634, sent Edward Winslow to England, and Governor Dudley and his council engaged him to present an humble pet.i.tion in their behalf.[22] Winslow was a shrewd diplomat, but was so far from succeeding with his suit that upon his appearance before the lords commissioners in 1635 he was, through Laud's "vehement importunity,"

committed to Fleet Prison, where he lay seventeen weeks.[23]

Gorges and Mason lost no time in improving their victory. February 3, 1635, they secured a redivision of the coast of New England by the Council for New England, into twelve parts, which were a.s.signed to as many persons. Sir William Alexander received the country from the river St. Croix to Pemaquid; Sir Ferdinando Gorges, the province of Maine from Pen.o.bscot to Piscataqua; Captain John Mason, New Hampshire and part of Ma.s.sachusetts as far as Cape Ann, while the coast from Cape Ann to Narragansett Bay fell to Lord Edward Gorges, and the portion from Narragansett Bay to the Connecticut River to the marquis of Hamilton.[24]

April 25, 1635, the Council for New England issued a formal declaration of their reasons for resigning the great charter to the king, chief among which was their inability to rectify the complaints of their servants in America against the Ma.s.sachusetts Company, who had "surrept.i.tiously" obtained a charter for lands "justly pa.s.sed to Captain Robert Gorges long before."[25] June 7 the charter was surrendered to the king, who appointed Sir Ferdinando Gorges "general governor." The expiring company further appointed Thomas Morton as their lawyer to ask for a _quo warranto_ against the charter of the Ma.s.sachusetts Company.

In September, 1635, judgment was given in Westminster Hall that "the franchises of the Ma.s.sachusetts Company be taken and seized into the king's hands."[26] But, as Winthrop said, the Lord "frustrated their designs." King Charles was trying to rule without a Parliament, and had no money to spend against New England. Therefore, the cost of carrying out the orders of the government devolved upon Mason and Gorges, who set to work to build a ship to convey the latter to America, but it fell and broke in the launching,[27] and about November, 1635, Captain John Mason died.

After this, though the king in council, in July, 1637, named Gorges again as "general governor,"[28] and the Lords Commissioners for Plantations, in April, 1638, demanded the charter anew,[29] the Ma.s.sachusetts general court would not recognize either order. Gorges could not raise the necessary funds to compel obedience, and the attention of the king and his archbishop was occupied with forcing episcopacy upon Scotland. In 1642 war began in England between Parliament and king, and Ma.s.sachusetts was left free to shape her own destinies. It was now her turn to become aggressive. Construing her charter to mean that her territory extended to a due east line three miles north of the most northerly branch of Merrimac River, she possessed herself, in 1641, of New Hampshire, the territory of the heirs of John Mason; and in 1653-1658, of Maine, the province of Gorges.

When the Long Parliament met, in 1641, the Puritans in England found enough occupation at home, and emigration greatly diminished. In 1643 Ma.s.sachusetts became a member of the New England confederation, and her population was then about fifteen thousand; but nearly as many more had come over and were distributed among three new colonies--Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Haven.

[Footnote 1: Bradford, _Plimoth Plantation_, 332; Winthrop, _New England_, I., 36.]

[Footnote 2: Force, _Tracts_, II., No. iv., 15.]

[Footnote 3: _Ma.s.s. Col. Records_, I., 75.]

[Footnote 4: Morton, _New English Canaan_ (Force, _Tracts_, II., No.

v.), 109.]

[Footnote 5: Dudley's letter (ibid., No. iv.).]

[Footnote 6: _Ma.s.s. Col. Records_, I., 75, 77.]

[Footnote 7: Palfrey, _New England_, I., 323, 324]

[Footnote 8: Ibid., 323.]

[Footnote 9: Hubbard, _New England_ (Ma.s.s. Hist. Soc., _Collections_, 2d series, V.), 138, 139; Winthrop, _New England_, I., 52.]

[Footnote 10: Winthrop, _New England_, I., 64.]

[Footnote 11: _Ma.s.s. Col. Records_, I., 82.]

[Footnote 12: Ibid., 87.]

[Footnote 13: Winthrop, _New England_, I., 84, 90, 152.]

[Footnote 14: _Ma.s.s. Col. Records_, II., 58, 59; Winthrop, _New England_, II., 115-118, 193.]

[Footnote 15: _Cal. of State Pap., Col._ 1574-1660, p. 158.]

[Footnote 16: Bradford, _Plimoth Plantation_, 356.]

[Footnote 17: Winthrop, _New England_, I., 122, 123.]

[Footnote 18: _Cal. of State Pap., Col._, 1574-1660, p. 174.]

[Footnote 19: Winthrop, _New England_, I., 161.]

[Footnote 20: Hazard, _State Papers_, I., 341.]

[Footnote 21: Winthrop, _New England_, I., 161, 163, 166, 186, 188, 224.]

[Footnote 22: Winthrop, _New England_, I., 163.]

[Footnote 23: Bradford, _Plimoth Plantation_, 393.]

[Footnote 24: Maine Hist. Soc., _Collections_, 2d series, VII., 183-188.]

[Footnote 25: _Cal. of State Pap., Col._, 1574-1660, pp. 200, 204.]

[Footnote 26: Hazard, _State Papers_, I., 423-425.]

[Footnote 27: Winthrop, _New England_, II., 12.]

[Footnote 28: _Cal. of State Pap., Col._, 1574-1660, p. 256.]

[Footnote 29: Hazard, _State Papers_, I., 432.]

CHAPTER XIII

RELIGION AND GOVERNMENT IN Ma.s.sACHUSETTS

(1631-1638)

The history of the beginnings of the Ma.s.sachusetts colony shows that there was no real unity in church matters among the first emigrants.

The majority were strongly tinctured with Puritanism, but nonconformity took on many shades of opinion. When it came to adopting a form of religion for Ma.s.sachusetts, the question was decided by the ministers and the handful who then enjoyed the controlling power in the colony, and not by the majority of inhabitants. It was in this way that the Congregational church, and not the Presbyterian church, or a simplified form of the Anglican church, obtained its first hold upon the colony.

The adoption of the law of 1631 making membership in the Congregational church the condition of citizenship, and the arrival at a later day of so many talented ministers embittered by persecution against the Anglican church, strengthened the connection and made it permanent. "G.o.d's word" was the law of the state, and the interpretation of it was the natural function of the clergy. Thus, through church influence, the limitations on thought and religious practice became more stringent than in the mother-country, where the suffrage took in all freeholders, whether they were adherents of the established church or not.

In Ma.s.sachusetts even Puritans who declined to acknowledge the form of church government prescribed by the self-established ecclesiastical authority were practically aliens, compelled to bear the burdens of church and state, and without a chance of making themselves felt in the government. And yet, from their own point of view, the position of the Puritan rulers was totally illogical. While suffering from persecution in England, they had appealed to liberty of conscience; and when dominant in America the denouncers of persecution turned persecutors.

A spirit of resistance on the part of many was the natural consequence of a position so full of contradiction. Instances of contumacy happened with such frequency and determination as should have given warning to those in control. In November, 1631, Richard Brown, an elder in the Watertown church, was reported to hold that "the Romish church was a Christian church." Forthwith the court of a.s.sistants notified the Watertown congregation that such views could not be allowed, and Winthrop, who went in person with the deputy governor, Dudley, used such summary arguments that Richard Brown, though "a man of violent spirit," thought it prudent to hold his tongue thereafter.

In November, 1634, John Eliot, known afterwards so well for his n.o.ble work among the Indians, in a sermon censured the court for proceeding too arbitrarily towards the Pequots. He, too, thought better of his words when a solemn emba.s.sy of ministers presented the matter in a more orthodox light.

In March, 1635, Captain Israel Stoughton, one of the deputies from Dorchester to the general court, incurred the resentment of the authorities. This "troubler of Israel," as Governor Winthrop termed him, wrote a pamphlet denying the right of the governor and a.s.sistants to call themselves "Scriptural Magistrates." Being questioned by the court, the captain made haste, according to the record, to desire that "the said book might be burned as being weak and oppressive." Still unsatisfied, the court ordered that for his said offence he should for three years be disabled from bearing any office in the colony.[1]

The first great check which this religious despotism received proceeded from Roger Williams, who arrived in February, 1631, in the _Lyon_, which brought supplies to the famishing colonists of Ma.s.sachusetts. He was the son of a merchant in London and a graduate of Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he took the degree of master of arts in 1627. In his mere religious creed Williams was harsher than even the orthodox ministers of Ma.s.sachusetts. Soon after his arrival he was invited to become one of the ministers of the Boston church, but refused because that church declined to make a public declaration of their repentance for holding communion in the churches of England while they lived in the home country.