colonies and at home no less steadily and effectively than the old
government of the King had done, and Cromwell, when he became Lord
Protector, proved a more watchful master than Charles had ever been,
as well as a more just. But Massachusetts took leave, because it was a
government of Puritans and her own friends, to practise a little more
openly the independence in the management of her own affairs which she
had all along meant and contrived to maintain. She very promptly dropped
the oath of allegiance to the King when she heard that the Parliament had
broken with him (1643); and now, when a commission which the Parliament
itself had set up sought to dictate to her, though it had explicit
authority “to provide for, order, and dispose all things as it saw fit”
in the management of the colonies, she boldly declared that she thought
it her right to govern herself without interference or appeal, so long
as she remained obedient and faithful to the government at home in all
things that affected Englishmen everywhere.
[Illustration: JOHN PYM]
[Illustration: PETER STUYVESANT’S BOWERY HOUSE]
She took occasion, while things went their new way, to set her own
government in order (1644),—between Mr. Pym’s death and the day of
Marston Moor,—while England was too much distracted to know what sort
of government she herself had. The Bay government was not a comfortable
government for any man to live under who was not a Puritan. The
magistrates stood behind the ministers of the congregation to enforce
their judgments in matters of morals, as well as to fulfil the law’s
commands in every ordinary matter of government. The discipline of life
which was thus imposed upon all alike, of whatever age or estate, made
the little commonwealth a model place of steady work and clean living.
Nowhere else in the world would you hear so few oaths uttered, or see
so few idle or drunk or begging. The magistrates watched the lives and
behavior of their people very diligently, and no man who did not live
decently and reverently could long escape their punishment or rebuke.
The weak and the sensitive suffered very keenly under their rigor, and
those who were naturally gay and of high spirits found it very irksome
and painful to be always on their guard not to jest too often or amuse
themselves overmuch. Sometimes the reason of a high-wrought nature
here and there would break down under the burden of stern doctrine
and colorless living put upon it by church and state. But the strong
and naturally grave men who predominated in the staid towns found it
a fine tonic to be so governed, and were confirmed in their strength
and self-control. In 1648 they drew more sharply than ever the lines of
the church’s right to rule, in a formal platform adopted, in synod, at
Cambridge. The authority of the clergy was given clear definition of
law; the power of the magistrates to coerce all churches which should
“walk incorrigibly or obstinately in any corrupt way of their own,”
was affirmed more definitely than ever; and the ecclesiastical polity
of the New England churches was declared to be such a “Congregational”
establishment as should in no wise be confounded with any of “those
corrupt sects and heresies which showed themselves under the vast title
of Independency.” This “Cambridge platform” the General Court submitted
to the congregations and the several congregations adopted. Henceforth no
man need doubt what compulsion of worship and belief he must live under
there.
New Haven and Connecticut could have admired the orderly peace and
prosperity of Massachusetts more if they had found her juster and more
generous in the part she played in the government of the confederation.
In that they deemed her selfish. The colonies had an equal vote in
the council of the confederation, but were obliged by the articles
of their union to contribute to its expenses, not equally, but in
proportion to their population, which threw much the heaviest burden upon
Massachusetts. She, therefore, opposed all occasion of expense in matters
in which she was not herself particularly interested. She would not vote
to help New Haven get redress for the injuries which the Dutch had done
her in the South River; she absolutely refused to take part in levying
war on the Dutch when the other commissioners of the confederation
voted it, when England herself was at war with the Netherlands; and
she demanded tolls upon all goods brought from the other colonies into
Boston, because the confederation sustained Connecticut’s right to charge
tolls at the mouth of the Connecticut River. It seemed a profitless
partnership enough to Plymouth and Connecticut, but most of all to New
Haven, which had suffered most from the Dutch.
[Illustration: TITLE-PAGE OF THE EARLIEST BOOK ON THE NEW HAVEN COLONY]
The New Haven men were merchants, and had not forgot their purposes of
trade when they came from London with Mr. Davenport to seek a place where
they might worship as they pleased. They had chosen the quiet southerly
harbor at which they had settled because of its outlook upon regions of
trade, north and south, within the forests and along the coasts which
spread about them; and it had come close upon ruining them to lose all
that they had laid out upon the settlement on the South River of New
Netherland which the Dutch had destroyed. Nothing seemed to prosper with
them. While they yet waited and hoped to get redress from the Dutch,
they laid out a full thousand pounds upon the fittings and freight of a
vessel to be sent into England, with some of their chief men on board,
to obtain both trade and a charter in the mother country; and had cut
the ice in their harbor at midwinter in their haste to get her out. But
they never saw the ship again, nor any that went out upon her. One June
day, indeed, in 1649, while a vague mist lay upon the bay, there suddenly
appeared the form of a ship upon the water, with all her tackling, and
her sails set, “and presently after, upon the top of the poop, a man
standing with one arm akimbo under his left side, and in his right hand
a sword stretched out towards the sea. Then from the side of the ship
which was from the town arose a great smoke, which covered all the ship,
and in that smoke she vanished away.” For as much as a quarter of an
hour the crowd upon the beach, both men and women, gazed steadfast upon
the phantom; and many deemed when it was gone that they had seen their
lost craft and treasure. That same year, 1649, they turned again to the
commissioners of the confederation with their urgent prayer for forcible
redress against the Dutch,—and got nothing. Massachusetts again declined
to lend her assistance, and war between England and Holland blew off
before it came to actual conflict between the Dutch and the English in
America. New Netherland began to show itself stronger than ever under
a new governor,—no very wise man, but much better than Van Twiller and
Kieft and the rest of the foolish men who had preceded him.
[Illustration: ARRIVAL OF STUYVESANT AT NEW AMSTERDAM]
[Illustration: PETER STUYVESANT]
Peter Stuyvesant had been sent over as governor in 1647. He made an
odd figure with his wooden leg, marvellously contrived with bands and
ornaments of silver, and the sly burghers of the simple-mannered New
World made a jest of his pretentious way of carrying himself by calling
him their “grand Muscovy Duke.” But he moved about among them with a
certain show of force and dignity, for all that, if he did have to limp
at the business, and he made men understand at least that he was a
person to be obeyed. He was quite as truculent and violent of temper and
arbitrary as Kieft had been before him; but he was much more efficient,
and was able to come to an understanding with his neighbors, both on
the Sound and within the South River. In 1650 a treaty was at last
agreed upon with the English which fixed the boundaries between their
settlements and the Dutch, reserving on the Connecticut itself only the
fort of Good Hope and the little plot of ground about it; and though
the people at Hartford nevertheless seized and appropriated that also,
once for all, when they heard of the war between the Netherlands and the
Commonwealth at home (1654), that was no great loss, and did not disturb
the boundaries which had been drawn beyond Greenwich on the mainland
and athwart Long Island at Oyster Bay. Stuyvesant more than compensated
himself for the loss of Good Hope; for that same year (1654) he took a
force that could not be withstood to the South River, and conclusively
put an end to the Swedish power there, making the river once more a part
of New Netherland, not to be disputed again by Sweden.
[Illustration: OLD STATE HOUSE OF NEW AMSTERDAM]
Death the while thrust his hand into the affairs of New England, and
sadly shifted the parts men were to play there. In 1647, the year
Stuyvesant came, Mr. Hooker had been taken, leaving no such shrewd and
kindly statesman and pastor behind him; and in 1649, the year the King
died upon the scaffold, John Winthrop departed,—the man who had founded
Massachusetts, and who had seemed its stay and prop. Then Mr. Cotton died
(1652), to be followed, scarcely six months later, by Mr. Dudley. Mr.
Haynes went in 1654, and the gentle Winslow in 1655; and then Standish,
the bluff soldier, who had carried so many of Plymouth’s burdens at the
first (1656), and Bradford, the peasant gentleman and scholar, whom all
had loved and trusted (1657). Last of all, Mr. Eaton was taken (1658),
and New Haven mourned her grave and princely merchant and governor as one
whom she could not replace. The first generation of leaders had passed
away; men of a new kind were to take their places.
[Illustration: ORIGINAL TOWN HOUSE, BOSTON, 1657-1711. BUILT BY THOMAS
JOY, FROM HIS OWN DESIGN]
Endecott still lived, to be elected governor year after year till he died
(1665). Thirty years in the wilderness had done little to soften his
hard rigor against those who offended, though it were never so little,
against the law or order of the colony, whether in matters of life or
doctrine. He was quick to bring men and women alike to punishment for
slight offences; and the days of his rule were darkened by the execution
of several Quakers who had refused to quit the colony when bidden. The
air cleared a little of such distempers when he was gone.
The _authorities_ and _sources_ for the period covered in this
Section have already been named, in connection with the history
of the several colonies, under Sections I. to V. of this
chapter. There should be added, however, to the authorities on
_Virginia_, Robert Beverley’s _History of Virginia_, which is
here almost a first-hand source.
For the history of this period in England the exhaustive
authority is Mr. Samuel Rawson Gardiner, in his _History of
the Great Civil War, 1642-1649_, and his _History of the
Commonwealth and Protectorate_.
VII. THE RESTORATION
All Europe feared England’s power while Cromwell ruled. No such masterful
spirit had stood at the front of her affairs since great Elizabeth’s
day, and there seemed to be revived in him the same wide vision in the
making of plans and the same passionate resoluteness in executing them
that had drawn Ralegh and Drake and Frobisher and Hawkins forth to their
adventures on the sea, seeking conquests for England at the ends of the
earth. It was not enough for him that he should subdue Ireland and quiet
Scotland by force of arms, and make himself master at home. He deemed it
his duty to lead England forward once again towards the great destiny
of conquest and power which men had had clear sight of in the brave
days of Shakespeare and good Queen Bess, but had seemed to forget and
lose heart for while the unkingly Stuarts reigned. Acting upon secret
instructions from the Protector, Major Robert Sedgwick, of Charlestown,
in Massachusetts, and Captain John Leverett, of Boston, led an English
force into Acadia, where the French were, upon the Bay of Fundy, and made
it by sudden conquest an English province (1654). That same year Admiral
Blake was sent into the Mediterranean to punish the Duke of Tuscany and
the pirates of Tunis for injuries they had inflicted on merchantmen out
of England; and the next year, 1655, a great fleet was put upon the seas
to go into the West Indies against the possessions of Spain, and there
gave the great island of Jamaica the flag and commerce of England.
[Illustration: SIGNATURES OF ROBERT SEDGWICK AND JOHN LEVERETT]
Cromwell had demanded of Spain freedom of trade in the West Indies
and the exemption of English subjects from the horrid tyranny of the
Inquisition; not because he thought that Spain would grant these things,
but because he saw what England must demand and get if she would compete
for power with the Spaniard, who still every year drew great stores of
gold and silver and other treasure from her rich colonies in the West.
He no doubt expected Spain to refuse what he demanded, and meant from
the first to send men-of-war to take what she would not give. He seemed
to know, like the statesman he was, what the possession of America and
of her trade would mean in the future, and he was acting under counsel
from America itself in what he did: the counsel of Mr. Hooke, the shrewd
pastor at New Haven, his confidant and relative, of Mr. Cotton, of
Boston, whom Mr. Hooke had urged to write to the Lord Protector, and
of Roger Williams, who was in England (1651-1654) while the thing was
being considered, who was often admitted to private conferences with the
Lord Protector, and whose knowledge, sagacity, frankness, and sweetness
of nature proved much to that great soldier’s liking. These men were
Puritans of the same stock, breeding, and party with himself. They hated
Spain as he did, as the chief instrument of the Romish Church, and they
wished to cut her treasures off.
The Lord Protector was no stranger to America. It was told that he had
himself tried to get away to the safe refuge of the Puritan colonies in
the dark days when Charles was master and would not call a Parliament.
He had joined others in signing the letter which certain members of
Parliament sent into New England inviting Mr. Hooker to come back to
England to assist at the reform of the Church; and he had been one of
the commissioners whom Parliament had appointed in 1643 to dispose of
all things in the colonies as they saw fit—the commissioners from whom
Mr. Williams had obtained his charter for the Providence Plantations. No
doubt Cromwell would have made a greater empire for England in America
had his hands been free at home; but death overtook him ere his plans had
widened to that great work (3 September, 1658).
[Illustration: TITLE-PAGE OF PROTEST OF THE QUAKERS PUBLISHED IN LONDON
EARLY IN 1660]
Massachusetts used the time while the Commonwealth stood not only to
settle a little more carefully the forms of her own government, but also
to extend her jurisdiction over the new settlements which were springing
up about her to the northward, and to set up a mint of her own to coin
shillings, sixpences, and threepences to take the place of the money so
fast drawn off into England to pay for the goods brought thence. And,
since her people were nearly all of one mind and creed in matters of
religion, she took occasion to regulate her church affairs even more
stringently than the Puritans at home ventured to regulate the faith and
worship of England. She put her new “Cambridge platform” rigorously into
practice, stopping to doubt neither its righteousness nor its expediency.
She not only thrust Quakers out, but sternly forbade all dissent from the
doctrines taught by her preachers, and required that even the officers of
her militia should be members of the authorized church. There was here no
radical change. Massachusetts was but confirming herself in her old ways
with a somewhat freer hand than before, because no fear of reproof or
correction from the government over sea any longer restrained her.
[Illustration: SEAL OF VIRGINIA AFTER THE RESTORATION]
Virginia, meanwhile, underwent a veritable transformation. When the
Parliamentary commissioners came to Jamestown in 1652, in their frigate,
to summon the colony to make her submission to the Commonwealth, they had
had to deal, as they knew, with no special class of Englishmen like the
Puritans in New England, but with average Englishmen, mixed of gentle and
common, too far away from England to be very hot party men upon either
side in respect of the sad quarrel between the King and the Puritans.
They professed, like other English subjects, to belong to the Church of
England, and their own government there in the colony had but the other
day sent nearly a thousand settlers packing out of its jurisdiction
into Maryland because, though quiet people enough and fair to deal with
in other matters, they had refused to observe the forms of the Church,
and had openly practised a manner of worship and of church government
like that set up in New England, and now in England itself. But the
Virginians, take them rank and file, were not really very strenuous
about the matter themselves. The Burgesses commanded very strictly the
observance of the canons of the Church of England in every matter of
worship; but the scattered congregations of easy-going colonists were in
fact very lax, and observed them only so far as was convenient and to
their taste. Archbishop Laud would very likely have thought them little
better than Puritans in the way they governed their churches,—for each
neighborhood of planters was left to choose its own minister and to go
its own way in the regulation of its forms of service. They revered the
great mother Church over sea very sincerely, and meant to be faithful
to it in everything that should seem essential; but the free life of
the New World made them very democratic in the ordering of the details
of practice, and they were glad that there were no bishops nearer than
England. Some among them, perhaps not a few scattered here and there,
were known to think like the Puritans in matters of government, if
not in matters of worship; and there were men of substance among the
number, men like Captain Samuel Mathews, for example, one of the chief
men of means in the colony, whom all deemed “a true lover of Virginia,”
notwithstanding the frank and open freedom he used in differing with his
neighbors when they exalted Church or King.
[Illustration: JAMES BLAIR]
Captain Richard Bennett they elected governor under the new agreement
with the Commonwealth in England, notwithstanding the fact that he had
been the leader of the Puritans whom Sir William Berkeley had driven
into Maryland for contumacy in disobeying the laws of the colony, and
had, besides, been one of the commissioners who had compelled them to
submit to the Puritan government in England. When his term was out they
chose Mr. Edward Digges, who was no Puritan, and then Captain Mathews
himself, who died in the office just as the Commonwealth came to an
end in England. The Burgesses were the real governors of the colony
all the while, as they made Captain Bennett and Mr. Digges and Captain
Mathews understand, and the House of Burgesses was made up of men of
all opinions. Some parts of the colony were very impatient under the
government that had ousted the King, and those parts were as freely
represented among the Burgesses as any others. There was Northampton
county, for example, lying almost by itself, on the “eastern shore”
beyond the Bay, whose local authorities, not content with what the
Burgesses had put into their resolutions concerning the death of the
King, had themselves proclaimed Charles, the dead king’s son, “King of
England, Scotland, Ireland, and Virginia, and all other remote provinces
and colonies, New England, and the Caribda Islands” (December, 1649). It
cost a good deal of watchfulness and steadiness in governing to keep such
men quiet even under their own assembly; and the Burgesses themselves
hastened to call Sir William Berkeley back to the governorship again
when they learned that Richard Cromwell had declined to maintain his
father’s place in the government at home. England had not yet enthroned
Charles II.; things hung for many months in a doubtful balance; and
the Burgesses conducted Virginia’s government the while in their own
name. Sir William Berkeley was only their servant as yet, and they chose
Captain Bennett also to be of the governor’s council; but Sir William
was more to their mind, after all, than commonwealth men, and they very
promptly acknowledged him the King’s governor again when they knew that
Charles had been received and restored in England,—returning with a
certain sense of relief to their old allegiance and their long accustomed
ways of government.
[Illustration: CHARLES II.]
Then it was that it began to become apparent how much Virginia had
changed while the Commonwealth stood, and how uneasy she must have become
had the Commonwealth lasted much longer. During that time a great host of
royalist refugees had sought her out as a place of shelter and safety, if
not of freedom,—a great company, to be counted at first by the hundreds
and then by the thousands, until Virginia seemed altered almost in her
very nature and make-up. The steady tide of immigration did not stop
even at the fall of the Commonwealth and the restoration of Charles, the
King. The congenial province still continued to draw to itself many a
Cavalier family whom days of disaster and revolution had unsettled, or
to whom she now seemed a natural place of enterprise and adventure. Not
the regions of the first settlement merely, on either side the James, but
the broad tide-water country to the northward also between the York and
the Rappahannock, between the Rappahannock and the great Potomac, filled
with the crowding new-comers. In 1648 there had been but fifteen thousand
English people in Virginia; in 1670 there were thirty-eight thousand, and
nine new counties sent Burgesses to her assembly. The population had more
than doubled in about twenty years; and most of those who had come from
over sea to be added to her own natural increase were Cavaliers, men who
wished to see the rightful King upon the throne, and England secure once
more under her ancient constitution.