COLONISATION OF MASSACHUSETTS.
The early unsuccessful attempts of the Plymouth company to obtain a
settlement in what was then called North Virginia, have already been
related. In the first instance, in 1606, the Spaniards captured the
vessel which they had sent out; in the second, the hardships of a severe
winter, with a few trying though by no means extraordinary casualties,
discouraged the colonists so far that Popham, their president, being
dead, and Gilbert having by the decease of his brother become heir to
his property, they determined to return to England with what speed they
could, and accordingly the ships, which the following year visited the
infant colony with supplies, carried them back. Returned thus to
England, they reported very unfavourably of the country, and exaggerated
their own sufferings to furnish an excuse for their want of courage and
perseverance. The Plymouth company, though much dissatisfied, especially
as the American fisheries and fur trade were now carried on with great
success, many ships annually visiting those northern coasts, and
occasionally even wintering there, were unable, after these failures, to
excite any further public interest in their schemes.
In 1614 Captain John Smith, whom we have known already so favourably in
Virginia, and who had long asserted, with a sagacity unusual in that
age, that colonisation was the true policy of England, entered this
abandoned field of enterprise, and with two ships, the private venture
of himself and four merchants of London, set sail for the northern coast
of the lands included in the Virginia patent. “Captain John Smith,” says
the early chronicle of Charlestown, in Massachusetts, “having made a
discovery of some parts of America, lighted, amongst other places, upon
the opening betwixt Cape Cod and Cape Ann, situate in 71° of west
longitude and 42° 20′ of north latitude; where by sounding and making up
he fell in amongst the islands, and advanced up into the Massachusetts
Bay, till he came up into the river between Mishawum, afterwards called
Charlestown, and Shawmutt, afterwards called Boston, and having made
discovery of the land, rivers, coves, and creeks in the said bay, and
also taken some observations of the manners, dispositions, and sundry
customs of the numerous Indians, or nations inhabiting the same, he
returned to England, where on his arrival he presented a map of the
Massachusetts Bay to the king; and the prince, afterwards King Charles
I., called the river Charles River.” The name of New England, which
Smith gave to the country, was also confirmed by the monarch, but the
northern promontory of Massachusetts Bay, which he had called
Tragabigzanda, in remembrance of the Turkish lady whose slave he had
been at Constantinople, was changed by Prince Charles into Cape Ann,
from regard to his mother, and by this appellation it is still known;
the name of the Three Turks’ Heads which he gave to three islands at the
entrance of the Bay, has also been changed, and a cluster of islands
which he had called after himself is now known as the Isle of Shoals.
Smith having successfully accomplished the purposes of his voyage, set
sail homeward, leaving the second ship, commanded by one Thomas Hunt, to
complete its lading and follow; but, as had been so often the case
before, no sooner was Smith gone than mischief befell. Hunt, under
pretence of trade, decoyed four-and-twenty Indians on board, and carried
them away to Malaga, where he sold most of them for £20 a man as slaves,
and would have sold them all, had not, says Cotton Mather, “the friars
in those parts, learning whence they came, took away the rest of them,
that so they might nurture them in the Christian religion.” This base
action so incensed the natives, that for some time it was dangerous to
the English to touch upon the shore; nevertheless, God, who frequently
allows good to be produced from evil, overruled this outrage to the
subsequent benefit of his people. Squanto, one of the poor Indians,
escaping from bondage, fled to London; and after five years being
restored to his country, became useful to the colonists as an
interpreter.
Encouraged by the commercial success of his voyage, Smith was sent out
in the following year, still in the employment of the Plymouth company,
to establish a colony in New England; but through the violence of
tempests he was compelled to give up the endeavour. Again he went out,
but his crew mutinied, and he was finally captured by French pirates and
carried into France. But the spirit of this brave man never forsook him;
he escaped alone from Rochelle in an open boat, and arrived in England,
where he devoted himself with all that ardour which was natural to his
character to excite an enthusiasm towards his favourite scheme of the
colonisation of New England. He published a map and description of the
country, and visited in person the gentry and merchants of the West of
England, suiting his promises of success to the character of the classes
whom he addressed; to the merchant he proposed commercial enterprise and
the establishment of cities, to the nobleman vast and wealthy dominion,
and to the lover of leisure and indulgence presented pictures of an
Arcadian life, with the pleasures of “angling and crossing the sweet
air,” as he himself words it, “from isle to isle, over the silent
streams of a calm sea;” but from all, with a blameable want of candour,
he concealed dangers and difficulties.
He succeeded in arousing a spirit of enterprise. New plans of
colonisation were formed, and Smith was appointed admiral of the country
for life. So far was comparatively easy; great difficulties, however,
arose in the obtaining a charter for the new undertaking. The London
company, jealous of a rival, threw difficulties and impediments in the
way. It was not till two years had passed that a charter could be
obtained. In November, 1620, King James granted what is distinguished
among the New England historians as the “Great Patent,” by which the
whole of North America, from the 40th to the 48th degree of north
latitude, “excepting such places as were already possessed by any other
Christian prince or people,” was granted wholly and entirely, with full
rights of jurisdiction, traffic and settlement, to forty noblemen and
merchants, incorporated as “The Council established at Plymouth, in the
county of Devon, for the planting, ruling, ordering and governing of New
England, in America.” Such a grant, which was intended to comprise
everything, and secure and hasten colonisation, defeated its own object,
and led to nothing but disputes. The English nation itself remonstrated,
through its members in the House of Commons, on such an exercise of
royal prerogative for the benefit of private individuals; and the
French, who had already for seventeen years had possession of various
trading stations on the coast, ridiculed and defied this wholesale
appropriation.
God, however, in his marvellous providence, had other purposes in view
for New England than the profit of the merchant or the aggrandisement of
the nobleman. As he had sifted out the baser elements by suffering,
death and much sorrow before the colonisation of Virginia was permitted
to take deep root and flourish, so now, more memorably in the case of
New England, was his arm stretched forth to prevent and counteract its
appropriation by any but those for whom it was intended, and who there
might remain for ages to become a purer and better people;—for those
who, though they had not yet attained to the glorious accomplishment of
Christianity in its perfect law of love, were yet the great and shining
lights of God’s truth at that time. Whilst therefore the national and
the private companies were disputing about the objects and spirit of the
new charter, the people of God, persecuted and trodden down as they had
been for ages, were following the guidance of a new voice sounding from
the wilderness, and, without charter or royal licence, were taking
permanent possession of the soil. The Puritans were the true colonisers
of New England.
But before the Pilgrims land on Plymouth Rock we must take a summary
view of the growth of puritanism in England.
Henry VIII., when resolved to obtain his divorce from Catharine of
Arragon, denied the supremacy of the Pope, and insisted on his clergy
doing the same, and in this measure puritanism had its rise. A door was
opened by the king for the admission of the principles of the
Reformation; and though he himself was never anything but a Catholic in
spirit, yet his marriage with Anne Boleyn and his quarrel with the Pope
gave the more intelligent portion of the English people liberty to think
and judge for themselves. The Bible was no longer a sealed book
constituting merely a portion of the church ceremonial; Henry VIII. had
caused it to circulate in its English translation among the people. It
was read by all classes with eagerness, and the more it was read the
more was undermined the mere traditional teaching of religion. The human
mind began to think and to ask important questions, and amid this
questioning, the rottenness and insufficiency of old systems became more
and more apparent. With a new heart and a new life, a new and simpler
mode of religious instruction was requisite; this was what the Bible
taught them to seek for, and bold in the spirit of the Bible, it was not
long before it was demanded. But it was not in Henry’s spirit to grant
what the Bible dictated; the reformed English Church retained a
hierarchical constitution and nearly the whole Romish ceremonial. Henry
in his latter years forbade the general reading of the Scriptures,
limiting the privilege to noblemen and merchants, and died a Catholic in
heart. But light had been let in—the light of divine truth and
knowledge—and no human power could henceforth wholly obscure it.
The accession of Edward VI. favoured the establishment of protestantism
in England. He died. With Mary papacy was restored, and all the more
virulently in consequence of the hold which protestantism had taken in
the nation. John Rogers and Bishop Hooper, both Puritans, and many other
pious and enlightened men, suffered martyrdom. Burleigh asserts that
nearly 400 persons perished by imprisonment and at the stake. The
earnest, steadfast, uncompromising spirit of puritanism showed itself
early. Whilst Cranmer and others sought by recantations and prayers to
escape the pangs of martyrdom, the Puritan made no concession, asked no
favour, but died rejoicing to be accounted worthy to suffer for Christ’s
sake. Multitudes of the married clergy and others fled, during this
terrible storm of persecution, to the continent of Europe, as many
others had already done in the previous reigns; and carrying abroad with
them their spirit of inquiry and controversy, they differed in some
points, and became split into the two sects of Lutherans and Calvinists.
At Frankfort the two parties had a public quarrel; and when the death of
Mary allowed the protestant exiles—most of whom during her reign had
taken up their abode among the Calvinists of Geneva—to return to their
native land, they brought home the bitterness of their contention.
With Elizabeth, the Reformation, which had commenced in the reign of
Edward VI., was in some measure re-established. Many exiled Puritans
returned full of hope, and with yet more inveterate abhorrence of papacy
and papistical vestures and ceremonial, to discover, however, that the
great queen, the champion of protestantism, was herself only half
reformed, and that every bias of her character and inclination was in
favour of royal prerogative and established authority. A true daughter
of Henry VIII., Elizabeth regarded herself as head of the church, and
ruled it with a despotic will.
In January, 1563, a convocation of the clergy drew up the Thirty-nine
Articles; which, however, were not confirmed by act of parliament till
nine years later. But the measure for the continuance of the ceremonies,
and of the square cap and the surplice, of which the queen was a
resolute supporter, was carried by one vote. The bishops urged the
clergy to subscribe the liturgy and the ceremonies as well as the
articles; Coverdale, Fox, Gilpin, and others refused, and this was the
commencement of Nonconformity.
A great number of conscientious and excellent ministers were thus
excluded from their pulpits. To them these requirements of the law were
rank papacy, and they would not conform. Some in consequence became
physicians; some were received into private families, holding views
similar to their own, as chaplains; many fled to Scotland or the
continent, and many others with their families were reduced to beggary.
“The churches,” says an historian, “were shut; the public mind was
inflamed; 600 persons repaired to a church in London to receive the
sacrament; the doors were closed, no minister would officiate. The cries
of the people reached the throne; but the throne was inexorable, and the
archbishop preferred that his flock should perish rather than dispense
with the clerical robes of the Church of Rome.”
The violence of persecution aroused the spirit of the persecuted
tenfold; the press was resorted to as a means of defence, as well as for
the propagation of opinion, but to little purpose. Any book or pamphlet
reflecting on the present state of affairs was seized and burnt, and the
author subjected to a fine and imprisonment. On this the suspended
ministers and their party resolved on openly seceding from the church,
believing that as they were not permitted to preach nor to officiate
“without idolatrous geare, it was their duty to break off from the
public church and to assemble in private houses and elsewhere.” They did
so; they held their meetings in private houses and in fields and woods.
One congregation was broken up in London, and as many as could be seized
were hurried to prison. In 1575, ten men and one woman were condemned to
the stake; the woman recanted; eight of the ten were banished, and two
were burnt; and two others were put to death, after long and severe
imprisonment, for circulating the tracts of the Brownists.
The prisons were full of Nonconformists; “died,” says their historian,
“in their dungeons, like rotten sheep,” from hunger, cold and the
noisome state of the prisons; and three of their ministers, Barrow,
Greenwood, and Penry, were executed at Tyburn with peculiar
circumstances of cruelty. Nothing but the preserving power of God could
have left a remnant alive.
Still, though silenced by law and forbidden to preach or circulate their
opinions, their views operated as leaven through the whole mass of
society. Prohibitions, fines, imprisonments, ignominy, loss of property,
nay, even of life, could not extinguish their zeal. Their works,
produced at secret printing-presses, were diffused through the whole of
the land as by invisible agency. The human mind had now risen up to do
battle manfully for truth for conscience-sake, with the weapons of
powerful argument and the keen arrows of sarcasm and wit, and no might
of human oppression could overcome it.
In 1583, Grindall was succeeded by Whitgift, and with such prelates as
Whitgift and Bancroft, Elizabeth, as she grew old, grew more and more
intolerant. Whitgift, one of the fiercest of persecutors, used to go
down on his knees before the queen to implore her not to show the
slightest favour to the Nonconformists, lest it should invalidate her
own infallibility. Under his guidance she refused to listen to the
milder councils of her ministers; and the terrible Star Chamber and High
Commission Court exercised a power almost equal to the Inquisition in
Spain. Every one was compelled to answer on oath any question proposed
either against others or themselves. The whole country groaned together;
and Burleigh, remonstrating but in vain, declared that not even the
Inquisition of Spain used so many questions to entrap their victims.
Finally a law was enacted, that whoever above the age of sixteen refused
to go to church, attended a conventicle, or denied the queen’s
supremacy, should be imprisoned without trial till they conformed and
signed an article of recantation. Refusing to sign this, they should be
banished for life, or if refusing to quit the nation, or returning
without royal licence, should be put to death without benefit of clergy.
But not even this terrible law could wholly effect its purpose, whatever
ruin and misery it might occasion. There were already, in the counties
round London alone, 20,000 stiff-necked frequenters of conventicles, who
would not bow down to the Baal of conformity. Great numbers again fled
to Holland.
The persecutions of the Puritans, however, somewhat abated before the
death of Elizabeth, as a change of policy towards them was looked for on
the accession of James, from whom the puritan party might even expect
favour. But a very short time sufficed to prove how mistaken were these
hopes. James, though brought up in the strictest accordance with the
Calvinistic doctrines of the Scottish kirk, and though he had thanked
God, while in Scotland, that he was at the head of the best and purest
church in the world, by which he would stand to the death, and who
abused the English establishment, “with its ill-sung mass,” as “wanting
nothing of popery but the liftings;” yet no sooner had he arrived in
England, and was met by the servile obeisance of bishops, who knelt
before him and offered the most abject flattery, than he thanked God
that he was now the head of a church where the bishops knew how to
reverence a king. The bishops rejoiced; they had dreaded that in James,
England would have had a presbyterian monarch; they found him a shallow
boaster, whom their flatteries could make the tool of their will. Within
nine months of his accession his key-note was “No bishop, no king;” and
at the desire of his favourite bishops, he called a conference between
them and the Puritans, when on the Puritans requesting permission to
hold their assemblies for worship, the king interrupted them: “You are
aiming,” said he, “at a Scotch presbytery; there Jack, and Tom, and
Will, and Dick shall meet, and at their pleasure censure me and my
council, and all our proceedings. Then Will shall stand up and say ‘it
must be;’ then Dick shall reply, ‘nay, marry, but we will have it thus.’
And therefore I repeat my former speech, and say, the king alone shall
decide.” “I will have one doctrine,” said he, “and one discipline; one
religion in substance and in ceremony;” adding, “that he had lived among
such sort of men as the Puritans were since he was ten years old, but
might say of himself as Christ said, ‘though I lived among them, I was
none of them;’ nor did anything make me more detest their courses than
that they disallowed of all things which had been used in popery.” Then,
turning to his bishops, he declared that, “by his soul he believed
Ecclesiasticus was a bishop, and that a Scottish presbytery agreed as
well with monarchy as God and the devil.” And of the Puritans he said,
“I will make them conform, or I will harry them out of the land, or else
worse—only hang them, that’s all!”
Bishop Bancroft fell on his knees, and exclaimed, “I protest my heart
melteth for joy, that Almighty God, of his singular mercy, has given
such a king as has not been since the time of Christ!”
The king closed the conference by declaring “that if any would not be
quiet and show their obedience, they were worthy to be hanged.” Bancroft
was made archbishop of Canterbury. The canons of the church now in force
were revised and enlarged, and it was enacted that whoever should speak
against the Thirty-nine Articles, or the established church, should be
excommunicated, put beyond the benefit of law, and subjected to all
kinds of injury and injustice. This law was enforced with bitter
cruelty; 300 nonconformist ministers, many of whom had been pastors of
their congregations for twenty or thirty years, were very soon silenced,
while hundreds of brave and conscientious men were imprisoned, fined,
and driven into exile. Among those who sought refuge in Holland was the
well-known John Robinson, who is generally considered to be the father
of the Puritans in New England, and thus the royal bigot and persecutor
James became, through the overruling of God’s providence, the means of
establishing puritanism on the broad, free soil of America.
Through all the oppression and bigotry of this and the preceding reigns,
the general intelligence had, however, greatly increased; the struggle
between established authority and the growing spirit of popular liberty
was becoming more and more determined. “The Bible,” says the author of
the “History of Priestcraft,” “had been secretly making a mighty
revolution in the popular mind. In the troubles and sufferings which
kings and priests had inflicted, it had been the secret and precious
companion; its poetry the most magnificent, its maxims the most
profound, its promises the most momentous in the world, were not lost on
the human heart; its doctrines became more clearly understood, and the
spirit of man rose with its dignifying knowledge.” Enlightened,
enfranchised, ennobled by the glorious teachings of this divine book,
the victims of persecution became the unflinching promulgators of the
truth and the liberty for which they suffered. Oppression, imprisonment,
fines, spoiling of goods, and death, all were made the means of still
further creating in the human soul a necessity for the liberty which was
born through the Gospel.