You shalbee truely Loyall to our Sou^r Lord the Kinge his heires and
Successors; you shall not doe nor speake deuise or aduise any thinge
or thinges act or actes directly or Inderectly by Land or water;
that shall or may tend to the destruction or ouerthrow of any of
these plantations or towneshipes of the Corporation of New Plymouth;
neither shall you suffer the same to bee spoken or done but shall
hinder oppose and discouer the same to the Gou^r and Assistants of
the said Collonie for the time being or some one of them; you shall
faithfully submitt vnto such good and wholesome lawes and
ordinances; as either are or shalbee made for the ordering and
Gou^rment of the same; and shall endeauor to advance the good and
grouth of the seuerall Towneshipes and plantations within the
Lymetts of this Corporation by all due meanes and courses; all which
you p^rmise and sweare by the Name of the great God of heauen and
earth simply truely and faithfully to pforme as you hope for healpe
from God whoe is the God of truth and the punisher of ffalchood.
[1671.]
_In Massachusetts-Bay Colony._
When on the 4th of March 1628/9, Charles, “by the grace of God, Kinge of
England, Scotland, Fraunce, and Ireland, Defender of the Fayth, &c. in
the fourth yeare of our raigne” did by letters patent grant unto Sir
Henry Rosewell and his twenty-five associates, their heirs and assigns
forever, all that certain part of the grant of New England which his
“deare and royall father, Kinge James of blessed memory ... hath given
and graunted vnto the Counsell established at Plymouth in the County of
Devon” and which the said Council by deed dated the 19th of March,
1627/8, had “given, graunted, bargained, soulde, enfeoffed, aliened and
confirmed” to Sir Henry Rosewell, Sir John Young, Knightes, Thomas
Southcott, John Humphrey, John Endecott and Symon Whetcombe, their heirs
and associates forever, “To be houlden of vs our heires and successors,
as of our manor of Eastgreenewich, in the County of Kent, within our
realme of England,” under the name of the “Governor and Company of the
Mattachusetts Bay in Newe England, one bodie politique and corporate in
deede, fact, and name, ... and that by that name they shall have
perpetuall succession,”—may acquire lands, &c. have a common seal; and
that there shall be one Governor, one Deputy Governor, and eighteen
assistants to be chosen out of the freemen. He went farther, and
constituted “our welbeloved Mathewe Cradocke to be the first and present
Governor; Thomas Goffe to be Deputy Governor, and eighteen of the other
associates to be Assistants, who before they undertake the execution of
their offices and places shall respectively take their corporal oaths
for the faithful performance of their duties.” The Oath for Matthew
Craddock, as Governor, to be administered by a Master of the Chancery,
the Governor was then empowered to administer the oaths to the Deputy
Governor and Assistants nominated in the Charter. Oaths to subsequent
officers being arranged: the new Governor to take the Oath before the
old Deputy Governor, or two Assistants; and the new Deputy Governor,
Assistants and all other officers hereafter chosen to take the oath
before the Governor for the time being. They were empowered to transport
any of our loving subjects, or any strangers willing to become our
loving subjects, and any seven at least of their number had “full power
and authoritie to choose, nominate, and appointe such and soe many
others as they shall thinke fitt, and that shall be willing to accept
the same, to be free of the said Company and Body, and Them into the
same to admitt.” All subjects inhabiting the lands granted, and their
children “which shall happen to be borne there, or on the seas in goeing
thither, or retorning from thence shall have and enjoy all liberties and
immunities of free and natural subjects, ... as yf they and everie of
them were borne within the realme of England.” And the Governor and
Deputy Governor, and any two or more of the Assistants, at any of their
Courts or Assemblys shall and may at all times have full power to give
the Oath of Office and Oaths of Supremacy and Allegiance, or either of
them, to every person who may go to New England to inhabit in the same.
They were also authorized to make “the formes of such Oathes warrantable
by the lawes and statutes of this our realme of England as shalbe
respectivelie ministered vnto them, for the execuc̄on of the said
severall offices and places ... and ministring the said oathes to the
newe elected officers.”
At the end of the Charter appeared the Oath of Governor:
PRÆDICT, Matthaeus Cradocke Juratus est de Fide et Obedientiâ Regi
et Successoribus suis, et de Debitâ Exequutione Officij Gubernatoris
iuxta Tenorem P^r sentium, 18^o Martij, 1628. Coram me, Carola
Cæsare, Milite, in Cancellariâ Mr̃o.
Char. Cæsar.
By this Charter, under the privy seal of Cardinal Wolseley, was,
unwittingly, planted the seed of the fairest flower that ever bloomed in
the garden of colonization since Eden.
Up to August, 1630, the business of the Massachusetts-Bay Company was
transacted in London. But the business of the Massachusetts-Bay Colony
may be said to have really begun in May, 1631.
At “A Gen^rall Court holden att Boston, the 18th day of May, 1631. John
Winthrop, Esq̃ was chosen Goun^r for a whole yeare nexte ensueinge by
the gen^rall consent of the Court, according to the meaneing of the
pattent, and did accordingly take an oathe to the place of Goun̄^r
belonginge.”
“Tho: Dudley, Esq̃, is also chosen Deputy Gouñ^r for this yeare nexte
ensuing, & did in p^rsence of the Court take an oath to his place
belonginge.” And “to the end the body of the com̄ons may be p^rserued of
honest & good men, it was likewise ordered and agreed that for time to
come noe man shalbe admitted to the freedome of this body polliticke,
but such as are members of some of the churches within the lymitts of
the same.”
The Law that all freemen must be church members, while assented to in
Salem in 1631, was modified in 1632, probably for local reasons, that no
civil magistrate could be an elder in the church.
To give force to this law an Oath of Freemen was required, and this
service the newly appointed Governor and the Deputy Governor elected to
perform. The result of their labors, the original draft of the Oath of a
Freeman, in the handwriting of the first and greatest of the Governors
of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and the Oath of a Servant, in the
handwriting of the second Governor—a document perhaps only surpassed in
historical interest and importance by, and worthy to rank with, the
Declaration of Independence—is now, appropriately, in the possession of
the Public Library of the City of Boston, and its preservation assured.
Through the courtesy of the Trustees, this Society is permitted again to
give publicity to the excellent facsimiles of these interesting
documents, together with transcriptions of the somewhat obscure
handwriting, with interlineations and cancelled words showing, line for
line, the changes made by the authors, which first appeared in the
_Bulletin_ of the Library for July, 1894.