The Loyalists of America and Their Times Volume I Part 14

After the Court had adopted its answer of refusal to the King's signification, Mr. Bradstreet said: "I fear we take not a right course for our safety. It is clear that this signification is from his Majesty.

I do desire to have it remembered that I do dissent, and desire to have it recorded that I dissent, from that part of it as is an answer to the King's signification." Major Dennison declared his dissent from the letter to Mr. Morrice, as not being proportionate to the end desired, and he hoped, intended, and desired it might be entered--namely, due satisfaction to his Majesty, and the preservation of the peace and liberty of the colony.[153]

It is clear from the foregoing facts that the alleged invasion of chartered rights and privileges put forth by the ruling party of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay was a mere pretext to cover the long-cherished pretensions (called by them "dear-bought rights") to absolute independence; that is, the domination of the Congregationalist Government, to the exclusion of the Crown, to proscribe from the elective franchise and eligibility to office all but Congregationalists, and to persecute all who differed from them in either religious or political opinion, including their control and suppression of the freedom of the press.[154] They persisted in the cruel persecution of their Baptist brethren as well as of the Quakers, notwithstanding the King had established the fullest religious liberty by Royal Charter, granted in 1663 to the Colonies of Connecticut and Rhode Island, and had by his letters in 1662 and 1664, and subsequently, forbidden religious persecution and prescribed religious toleration as a condition of the continuance of the Charter in Ma.s.sachusetts Bay Colony.[155]

I will give in a note, from the records of their own Court, their persecuting proceedings against certain Baptists in April, 1666, six years after the Restoration.[156]

The Puritan historian, Neal, writing under date three years later, 1669, says: "The displeasure of the Government ran very high against the Anabaptists and Quakers at this time. The Anabaptists had gathered one Church at Swanzey, and another at Boston, but the General Court was very severe in putting the laws in execution against them, whereby many honest people were ruined by fines, imprisonment, and banishment, which was the more extraordinary because their brethren in England were groaning under persecution from the Church of England at the same time.

Sad complaints were sent over to England every summer of the severity of the Government against the Anabaptists, which obliged the dissenting ministers in London to appear at length in their favour. A letter was accordingly sent over to the Governor of Ma.s.sachusetts, signed by Dr.

Goodwin, Dr. Owen, Mr. Nie, Mr. Caryl, and nine other ministers, beseeching him to make use of his authority and interest for restoring such to their liberty as were in prison on account of religion, and that their sanguinary laws might not be put in execution in future." [Mr.

Neal gives the letter, and then proceeds.] "But the excellent letter made no impression upon them; the prisoners were not released, nor the execution of the laws suspended; nay, so far from this, that ten years after, in the year 1679, a General Synod being called to inquire into the evils that provoked the Lord to bring his judgments on New England, they mention these among the rest, 'Men have set up their thresholds by G.o.d's threshold, and their posts by G.o.d's post; Quakers are false worshippers, and such Anabaptists as have risen up among us, in opposition to the Churches of the Lord Jesus,' etc., etc."

"Wherefore it must needs be provoking to G.o.d if these things be not duly and fully testified against by every one in their several capacities respectively."[158]

The present of two large masts and a ship-load of timber; successive obsequious and evasive addresses; explanations of agents; compliance in some particulars with the Royal requirements in regard to the oath of allegiance, and administering the law, so far appeased the King's Government that further action was suspended for a time in regard to enforcing the granting of the elective franchise, eligibility to office, and liberty of worship to other than Congregationalists,[159] especially as the attention of Charles was absorbed by exciting questions at home, by his war with Holland, which he bitterly hated, and his intrigues with France, on which he became a paid dependant. But the complaints and appeals to the King from neighbouring colonies of the invasion of individual and territorial rights by the Court of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay, and from the persecuted and proscribed inhabitants of their own colony, awakened at last the renewed attention of the King's Government to the proceedings of the Ma.s.sachusetts Bay rulers. The letter which the King was advised to address to them is kind and conciliatory in its tone; but it shows that while the King, as he had declared in his first letter, addressed to them seventeen years before, recognized the "Congregational way of worship," he insisted on toleration of the worship of Episcopalians, Baptists, etc., and the civil rights and privileges of their members,[161] denied by these "fathers of American liberty" to the very last; until then, power of proscription and persecution was wrested from them by the cancelling of their Charter.

The chief requirements of this letter were, as stated by Mr. Hutchinson:

"1. That agents be sent over in six months, fully instructed to answer and transact what was undetermined at that time.

"2. That freedom and liberty of conscience be given to such persons as desire to serve G.o.d in the way of the Church of England, so as not to be thereby made obnoxious, or discountenanced from their sharing in the government, much less that they, or any other of his Majesty's subjects (not being Papists) who do not agree in the Congregational way, be by law subject to fines or forfeitures or other incapacities.

"3. That no other distinction be observed in making freemen than that they be men of competent estates, rateable at ten shillings, according to the rules of the place, and that such in their turns be capable of the magistracy, and all laws made void that obstruct the same.

"4. That the ancient number of eighteen a.s.sistants be observed, as by Charter. (They had been limited to eight or ten.)

"5. That all persons coming to any privilege, trust or office, take the oath of allegiance.

"6. That all military commissions as well as proceedings of justice run in his Majesty's name.

"7. That all laws repugnant to, and inconsistent with, the laws of England for trade, be abolished."[164]

There were certain injunctions in regard to complaints from neighbouring colonies; but the necessity for such injunctions as those above enumerated, and stated more at large in the King's letter, as stated in note on p. 187, given for the third or fourth time the nineteenth year after the Restoration, shows the disloyal proscriptions and persecuting character of the Government of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay, and the great forbearance of the King's Government in continuing the Charter while the conditions of its proposed continuance were constantly violated.

Dr. Palfrey speaks of these requirements, and the whole policy of the King's Government, as "usurpations" on the chartered rights of the Ma.s.sachusetts Bay Colony. But let any reader say in which of the above seven requirements there is the slightest "usurpation" on any right of a British subject; whether there is anything that any loyal British subject would not freely acknowledge and respond to; requirements unhesitatingly obeyed by all the colonies except that of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay alone, and which have been observed by every British Province of America for the last hundred years, and are observed by the Dominion of Canada at this day.

Dr. Palfrey, referring to this period (1676-82), says: "Lord Clarendon's scheme of colonial policy was now ripe," but he does not adduce a word from Lord Clarendon to show what that policy was only by insinuations and a.s.sertions, and a.s.sumes it to have been the subversion of the rights and liberties of the Ma.s.sachusetts Bay Colony. Lord Clarendon, in his letter to the Governor Endicot, given above, pp. 160, 161, explains his colonial policy, which was not only to maintain the Charter in its integrity, but to see that its provisions and objects were not violated but fulfilled, and that while the Congregational worship should not be interfered with, the Congregational Government should not proscribe from the elective franchise and liberty of worship the members of other Protestant denominations. The Hon. Robert Boyle, the philosopher and benefactor of New England, and President of the New England Society for Propagation of the Gospel among the Indians, expressed the same views with Lord Clarendon, and there is not a shadow of proof that Lord Clarendon ever entertained any other policy in regard to New England than that which he expressed in his letter to Governor Endicot in 1664.

Dr. Palfrey and other New England historians occupy four-fifths of their pages with accounts of the continental proceedings of the Governments of the Stuarts, and their oppressions and persecutions of Nonconformists in England, and then _a.s.sume_ that their policy was the same in regard to the New England Colonies, and that the Ma.s.sachusetts Bay Colony was therefore the champion defender of colonial liberties, in denying responsibility to the Imperial Government for its acts, and refusing the usual oaths, and acts of allegiance to the Throne; whereas their _a.s.sumptions_ (for they are nothing else) are unsupported by a single fact, and are contradicted, without exception, by the declarations and acts of the Government of Charles the Second, as well as by those of his royal father. Language can hardly exaggerate or reprobate in too strong terms the cruel persecutions of dissenters from the Established Episcopal Church in England, by both Charles the First and Charles the Second; but the Congregational Government of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay exceeded that of the Charleses in proscribing and persecuting dissenters from their Established Congregational Churches in that colony; and as well might Messrs. Palfrey, Bancroft, and other New England historians maintain that, because Congregationalists contended for liberty of worship for themselves in England, they practised it in regard to those who did not agree with them in worship in Ma.s.sachusetts Bay. The proscription and persecution of Congregationalists and Baptists by Episcopalian rulers in England were outrivalled by the Congregational rulers in their proscriptions and persecutions of Episcopalians and Baptists in Ma.s.sachusetts.

It is also a.s.sumed by the New England historians referred to that the King's advisers had intimated the intention of appointing a Governor-General over the Colonies of New England to see to the observance of their Charters and of the Navigation Laws; but wherein did this infringe the rights or privileges of any Colonial Charter? Wherein did it involve any more than rightful attention to Imperial authority and interests? Wherein has the appointment or office of a Governor-General of British North America, in addition to the Lieutenant-Governor of each province, ever been regarded to this day as an infringement of the rights and privileges of any Legislature or British subject in the colonies? Wherein has the right of appeal by any colony or party to the Supreme Courts or authorities of England, against the decisions of local Courts or local executive acts, been regarded as an infringement of colonial rights, or other than a protection to colonial subjects? When has the right of appeal by parties in any of the neighbouring States, to the Supreme Court at Washington, been held to be an invasion of the rights of such States?

The rulers of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay Colony concealed and secreted their Charter; they then represented it as containing provisions which no Royal Charter in the world ever contained; they represented the King as having abdicated, and excluded himself from all authority over them as a colony or as individuals; they denied that Parliament itself had any authority to legislate for any country on the western side of the Atlantic; they virtually claimed absolute independence, erasing the oath of allegiance from their records, proscribing and persecuting all nonconformists to the Congregational worship, invading the territories of other colonies and then maintaining their invasions by military force, denying the authority of Great Britain or of any power on earth to restrict or interfere with their acts. The New England historians referred to are compelled to confess that the Royal Charter contained no such provisions or powers as the rulers of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay pretended; yet their narratives and argumentations and imputations upon the British Government a.s.sume the truth of the fabulous representations of the Charter, and treat not only every act of the King as royal tyranny, but every suspicion of what the King might do as a reality, and the hostility of the Ma.s.sachusetts Bay Government as a defence of const.i.tutional rights and resistance of royal despotism. But in these laboured and eloquent philippics against the Government of the Restoration, they seem to forget that the Parliament and Government of the Commonwealth and Cromwell a.s.serted far larger powers over the colonies than did the Government and Parliament of Charles the Second (as is seen by their Act and appointments in their enactments quoted above, pp. 88-90).

The Commonwealth appointed a Governor-General (the Earl of Warwick), Commissioners with powers to remove and appoint Colonial Governors and other local officers; whereas the Commissioners appointed by Charles the Second had no authority to remove or appoint a single local Governor or other officer, to annul or enact a single law, but to inquire and report; and even as a Court of Appeal their proceedings and decisions were to be reported for final action in England.

The famous Act of Navigation itself, which ultimately became the chief ground of the American revolutionary war, was pa.s.sed by the Commonwealth, though, by a collusion between Cromwell and the rulers of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay, its provisions were evaded in that colony, while rigorously enforced in the other colonies.[165]

In the first year of Charles the Second this Act was renewed, with some additional provisions.[166]

But to return to the correspondence between the King's Government and the rulers of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay. It may be supposed that after the King had promised, in 1662, to forget past offences and continue the justly forfeited Royal Charter upon certain conditions, and that those conditions were evaded by various devices during nearly twenty years, the Royal patience would become exhausted, and that, instead of the gentle instructions and remonstrances which had characterized his former letters, the King would adopt more severe and imperative language. Hence in his next letter, September 30, 1680, to the Governor and Council of the Ma.s.sachusetts, he commences in the following words:

"CHARLES R.

"Trusty and well beloved, we greet you well. When by our Royal letter, bearing date the 24th day of July, in the one and thirtieth year of our reign, we signified unto you our gracious inclination to have all past deeds forgotten, setting before you the means whereby you might deserve our pardon, and commanding your ready obedience to several particulars therein contained, requiring withall a speedy compliance with the intimations of your duty given to your late agents during their attendance here, all which we esteem essential to your quiet settlement and natural obedience due unto us. We then little thought that those marks of our grace and favour should have found no better acceptance among you, but that, before all things, you should have given preference to the execution of our commands, when after so many months we come to understand by a letter from you to one of our princ.i.p.al Secretaries of State, dated the 21st of May last, that very few of our directions have been pursued by your General Court, the further consideration of the remaining particulars having been put off upon insufficient pretences, and even wholly neglecting your appointment of other agents which were required to be sent over unto us within six months after the receipt of our said letters, with full instructions to attend our Royal pleasure herein in relation to that our Government."

Among other matters, the King "strictly commanded and required" them, "as they tendered their allegiance," to despatch such agents within three months after their reception of the order, and with full powers to satisfy his Majesty on the subjects of complaint; and "he ended the letter," says Mr. Palfrey, "with a very definite injunction:"

"That the due observance of all our commands above mentioned may not be any longer protracted, we require you, upon receipt thereof, forthwith to call a General Court, and therein to read these our letters and provide for our speedy satisfaction, and in default thereof we shall take the most effectual means to procure the same. And so we bid you farewell."[167]

This letter led to the calling of a "Special General Court," January, 1681, in which very protracted debates ensued on the revision of the laws, so long delayed, and the election of agents to England according to the King's command. Samuel Nowell and John Richards were elected agents to England, but were restricted by instructions which forbade conceding anything from their original Charter pretensions, and therefore rendered their agency an insult to the Government and the King, and hastened the catastrophe which they so much dreaded, the cancelling of their Charter.

In the meantime, to appease the displeasure of the Crown, they pa.s.sed several Acts which had the appearance of obedience to the Royal commands, but which they were careful not to carry into effect.[168] I will give two or three examples.

They enacted "that the Acts of Trade and Navigation should be forthwith proclaimed in the market-place of Boston by beat of drum, and that all clauses in said Acts relating to this Plantation should be strictly taken notice of and observed." This appears very plausible, and is so quoted by Dr. Palfrey; but he does not add that care was taken that it should not be carried into effect. And to accomplish their purposes, and to a.s.sert the subordination of the Royal authority to their own local authority, "they const.i.tuted naval _officers_, one for Boston, the other for 'Salem and adjacent parts,' to be commissioned by the Governor, and to exercise powers of a nature to control the Collector appointed in England."[169]

After nearly twenty years' delay and evasions, they enacted, in 1679, "that the Governor, Deputy Governor, and Magistrates should take the oath of allegiance 'without any reservation,' in the words sent them by his Majesty's orders; but instead of the 'reservation' in their form of oath in former Acts, they virtually neutralized the oath by an Act requiring a prior preliminary oath of fidelity to the local Government,[170] an Act which the Board of Colonial Plantations viewed as 'derogatory to his Majesty's honour, as well as defective in point of their own duty.'"

They instructed their agents in England to represent that there was no colonial law "prohibiting any such as were of the persuasion of the Church of England." The design of this statement plainly was to impress upon the mind of the King's Government that there was no obstruction to the worship and ordinances of the Church of England, and that the elective franchise and privilege of worship were as open to Episcopalians as to Congregationalists--the reverse of fact. After repeated letters from the King in favour of toleration as one of the conditions of continuing their Charter, notwithstanding their past violation of it, they _professed_ to comply with the royal injunctions, but their professed compliance amounted practically to nothing, as they had evidently intended. The King's Commissioners had said to the Ma.s.sachusetts Bay Court on this subject: "For the use of the Common Prayer Book: His Majesty doth not impose the use of the Common Prayer Book on any; but he understands that liberty of conscience comprehends every man's conscience, as well as any particular, and thinks that all his subjects should have equal right." To this the Ma.s.sachusetts Court replied: "Concerning the use of the Common Prayer Book and ecclesiastical privileges, our humble addresses to his Majesty have fully declared our main ends, in our being voluntary exiles from our dear native country, which we had not chosen at so dear a rate, could we have seen the word of G.o.d warranting us to perform our devotions in that way; and to have the same set up here, we conceive it is apparent that it will disturb our peace in our present enjoyment."[171]

But afterwards they found it dangerous longer to resist the King's commands, and professed to obey them by providing that those who were not Congregationalists might exercise the elective franchise, provided that, in addition to taking the oath of fidelity to the local Government, and paying a rate which was not paid by one in a hundred, _and obtaining a certificate from the Congregational minister as to their being blameless in words and orthodox in religion, they were then approved by the Court_. The right of franchise was possessed by every member of any Congregational Church, whether he had property or not, or paid rate or not;[172] not so with any other inhabitant, unless he adduced proof that he had paid rate, produced a certificate of character and of orthodoxy in religion, signed by a Congregational minister, and was approved by the Court. No instance is recorded of any Episcopalian ever having obtained the freedom of the colony under such conditions; "nor," as Mr. Hutchinson says, "was there any Episcopal Church in any part of the colony until the Charter was vacated."[174]

The Court of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay also instructed their agents in England, in 1682, to represent that "as for Anabaptists, they were now subject to no other penal statutes than those of the Congregational way." But as late as the spring of 1680 the General Court forbade the Baptists to a.s.semble for their worship in a meeting-house which they had built in Boston.[175] The statement which they instructed their agents to make in England was clearly intended to convey the impression that the Baptist worship was equally allowed with the Congregational worship; but though penalties against individual Baptists may have been relaxed, their worship was no more tolerated than that of the Episcopalian until the cancelling of the Charter.

The same kind of misleading evasion was practised upon the Government in England in regard to the Quakers, as in respect to the Baptists, the Episcopalians, and the elective franchise. The agents of the colony in England were instructed to state that the "severe laws to prevent the violent and impetuous intrusions of the Quakers had been suspended;"

but they did not say that laws less severe had been subst.i.tuted, and that fines and imprisonments were imposed upon any party who should be present at a Quakers' meeting. Yet, as late as 1677, the Court of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay made a law "That every person found at a Quakers'

meeting shall be apprehended, _ex officio_, by the constable, and by warrant from a magistrate or commissioner shall be committed to the House of Correction, and there have the discipline of the house applied to him, and be kept to work, with bread and water, for three days, and then released, or else shall pay five pounds in money as a fine to the country for such offence; and all constables neglecting their duty in not faithfully executing this order, shall incur the penalty of five pounds upon conviction, one-third thereof to the informer."[176]

They likewise instructed their agents in England to give a.s.surance "That the Acts of Trade, so far as they concerned the colony, should be strictly observed, and that all due encouragement and a.s.sistance should be given to his Majesty's officers and informers that might prosecute the breaches of said Acts of Trade and Navigation."[177] But while as a Court they professed this in their records and through their agents in England, officers were elected in the colony who would not execute the law, and so not a farthing of duties was collected under it at Ma.s.sachusetts Bay.

Thus for twenty years the rulers of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay resisted and evaded the six conditions on which King Charles the Second, after his restoration, proposed to overlook and pardon their past offences and perpetuate the Charter given to them by his Royal father; for twenty years the King, without committing a single unconst.i.tutional or oppressive act against them, or without demanding anything which Queen Victoria does not receive, this day, from every colony of the British Empire, endured their evasions and denials of his authority and insults of his Commissioners and officers. In all the despatches of the King's Government to the rulers of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay, during these twenty years, as the reader of the preceding pages will have seen, the spirit of kindness, and a full recognition of their rights in connection with those of the Crown, were predominant.

This they repeatedly acknowledged in their addresses to the King. They pretended the Royal Charter gave them absolute independence; and on that absurd interpretation and lawless a.s.sumption they maintained a continuous contest with the mother country for more than fifty years.

Every party in England, and the Commonwealth as well as Royalty, maintained the right of King and Parliament to be the supreme tribunal of appeal and control in America as well as in England; while the rulers of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay Colony alone, in contradistinction to all the other British colonies in America, denied in short the authority of both King and Parliament, though often amidst wordy professions of personal loyalty to the Throne. Mr. Bancroft well sums up the history of Ma.s.sachusetts pretensions and intolerance in the sentences: "Ma.s.sachusetts owned no King but the King of Heaven." "Ma.s.sachusetts gave franchises to the members of the visible Church," but "inexorably disfranchised Churchmen, Royalists, and all the world's people." "In Ma.s.sachusetts, the songs of Deborah and David were sung without change; hostile Algonquins like the Canaanites were exterminated or enslaved; and a peevish woman was hanged, because it was written, 'The witch shall die.'"[178]

No hostile pen ever presented in so few and expressive words the character and policy of the Government of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay during the whole existence of the first Charter, as is presented in these words of their eulogist Bancroft; and these words express the causes of their contests with the Crown and Parliament, of their proscription and persecution of the majority of their fellow-colonists not of their politics or form of worship, and of their dealing at pleasure with the territories of their neighbours,[179] and the lands and lives of the Indian tribes.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 114: The captain of a ship brought the news from England in July, that the King had been proclaimed, but a false rumour was circulated that the Government in England was in a very unsettled state, the body of the people dissatisfied; that the Scotch had demanded work; that Lord Fairfax was at the head of a great army, etc. Such a rumour was so congenial to the feelings of the men who had been lauding Cromwell, that when it was proposed in the General Court of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay, in the October following, to address the King, the majority refused to do so. They awaited to see which party would prevail in England, so as to pay court to it. On the 30th of November a ship arrived from Bristol, bringing news of the utter falsity of the rumours about the unsettled state of things and popular dissatisfaction in England, and of the proceedings of Parliament; and letters were received from their agent, Mr. Leverett, that pet.i.tions and complaints were preferred against the colony to the King in Council. Then the Governor and a.s.sistants called a meeting of the General Court, December 9th, when a very loyal address to the King was presently agreed upon, and another to the two Houses of Parliament. Letters were sent to Sir Thomas Temple, to Lord Manchester, Lord Say and Seal, and to other persons of note, praying them to intercede in behalf of the colony. A most gracious answer was given to the address by the King's letter, dated February 15, 1660 (1661, new style), which was the first public act or order concerning them after the restoration. (Hutchinson's History of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay, Vol. I., pp. 210, 211.)]

[Footnote 115: Hutchinson's History of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay, Vol. I., pp.

211, 212.]

[Footnote 116: Holmes' Annals of America, Vol. I., p. 318. Hutchinson, Vol. I., p. 216. Hazard, Vol. II., pp. 593-595. The address is a curiosity in its way, and a strange medley which I must leave the reader to characterize in view of the facts involved. The following are the princ.i.p.al pa.s.sages of it:

Extracts from the Ma.s.sachusetts General Court--Address to the King, dated 19th December, 1660:

"To the High and Mighty Prince, Charles the Second, by the grace of G.o.d, King of Great Britain, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith.