Chapter II: New England, 1689-1763 (1)

BY JUSTIN WINSOR,

_The Editor_.

ANDROS, with Joseph Dudley and other satellites, made safe in Castle William, the revolution in New England was accomplished, and the veteran Simon Bradstreet was at the head of the old government on its sudden restoration (1689) to power.

The traditions of the charter-days were still strong among the country people, and their deputies in the resuscitated assembly brought into Boston the old spirit of independence to enliven the stifled atmosphere which the royal governor had spread upon the town. The new government was proposedly a provisional one to await the result of the revolution which seemed impending in England. If the policy of unwavering adherence to the old charter had been pursued with the constancy which characterized the advocacy of Elisha Cooke, the popular tribune of the day, the current of the New England history for the next few years might possibly have been changed. The sturdy assumption of political power did not follow the bold revolution which had prepared the way for it, and, professing dependence upon the royal will, all thoughts were now addressed to placate the new monarch, and regain by law what they had failed to achieve by a dogged assertion of right. King William, of whose accession they soon were notified, unhesitatingly, but for temporary service, confirmed the existing rulers.[157]

A command came for Andros to be sent to England, with a presentation of charges against him, and it was obeyed.[158] Increase Mather had already gone there to join Ashurst, the resident agent of the colony, and the people were not without hope that through the urgency of these representatives the restitution of the old charter might be confirmed. Subsequently Elisha Cooke and Thomas Oakes were despatched to reinforce the others. Mather, either because he felt the project a vain one, or because he hoped, under a new deal, to be better able to direct affairs, was favoring a new charter.

This follows the map in the Amsterdam ed. (1688) of Richard Blome’s _L’Amérique, traduit de l’Anglois_. This is a different map (on a larger scale) from the one in the original English edition of Blome. See reference to the map given in Mather’s _Magnalia_ (1702) in Vol. III. p. 345. This map is reproduced in Cassell’s _United States_, i. pp. 492, 516.

Douglass, with some excess, again speaks of Mather’s map (_Summary_, etc., i. 362) “as composed from some old rough drafts of the first discoverers, with obsolete names not known at this time, and has scarce any resemblance of the country,” and he calls Cyprian Southack’s maps and charts even worse. For Southack see _Mem. Hist. of Boston_.]

Plymouth, which had never had a royal charter, was endeavoring, through the agency of Ichabod Wiswall,[159] the minister of Duxbury, who had been sent over to protect their interests, to make the most of the present opportunity and get a favorable recognition from the king. Between a project of annexation to New York and Mather’s urging of an alternative annexation to the Bay, the weaker colony fared hard, and its ultimate fate was fashioned against its will. In the counsels of the four agents Cooke was strenuous for the old charter at all hazards, and Oakes sustained him. Mather’s course was professedly a politic one. He argued finally that a chance for the old charter was gone, and that it would be wiser to succumb in season to the inevitable, in order better to direct progress. When it came to a petition for a new charter, Oakes so far smothered his sentiments as to sign it with Mather; but Cooke held out to the last.

This follows a red-chalk drawing in the gallery of the American Antiquarian Society, which had belonged to the Rev. William Bentley, of Salem, who was born in Boston in 1759, and died in Salem in 1819.]

Meanwhile, Massachusetts was governing itself, and had enough to do in looking after its frontiers, particularly at the eastward, where the withdrawal of the troops which Andros had placed there became the signal for Indian outbreaks. New Hampshire, weak in her isolation, petitioned to be taken under the jurisdiction of Massachusetts, and was (March 19, 1690) for the time being annexed.[160] Connecticut, destined to save her charter by delays and a less fiery spirit, entered upon a career characterized in the main by dignified quiet. Though she participated in some of the tumult of the recurrent Indian wars, and let her bitterness against episcopacy sometimes lead to violent acts, she had an existence of much more content than fell to the lot of the other New England colonies.[161]

The first momentous event which the restored governments had to encounter was the disastrous expedition which Phips led against Quebec, in 1690. With confident hope, the fleet on the 8th of August sailed from Boston harbor, and the whole community for three months waited for news with great solicitude. Scarce three weeks had passed when Sewall records (August 28) that they got from Albany intelligence of the Mohawks’ defection, which, as he writes, “puts a great damp here to think that our fleet should be disappointed of their expected aid.”[162] Apprehension of some more imminent danger grew throughout the colony. In September they placed watches at night throughout Boston, and gave as watchwords “Schenectady” and “Salmon Falls,”—fearful reminders.[163] One night at Charlestown there was an alarm because Indians were seen in their back fields,—they proved to be runaway servants. Again, the home guard, eight companies, trained another day. At last tidings came from Plymouth of certain losses which the contingent of that colony, among the forces acting at the eastward, had suffered, news whereof had reached them. This and other matters were made the grounds of an attempt to found a regular channel of communicating the current reports, which in a little sheet called _Publick Occurrences_ was issued at Boston, Thursday, September 25, the precursor of the American newspaper. It told the people of various incidents of their every-day life, and warned them of its purpose to prevent false reports, and to correct the spirit of lying, “which prevails among us.” It represented that “the chief discourse of this month” was the ill-success of the expedition, which, under the command of Gen. Winthrop, of Connecticut, had attempted to advance on Montreal by way of Lake Champlain, to distract the enemy’s attention in that direction while Phips ascended the St. Lawrence.[164]

About six weeks later, on Friday, November 7, word came to the governor from Salem of the disastrous events in the St. Lawrence and the discomfiture of Phips.[165]

The unfortunate expedition had cost Massachusetts £50,000, and while the colony was devising an illusory scheme of paper money as a quick way of gathering taxes, Phips slipped off to England, with the hope that his personal explanations would assist in inducing the home government to lend a helping hand in some future attempt.

When Phips reached England he found that Mather had done good work in preventing the reinstalling of Andros, as at one time was threatened.[166]

Memorials and counter-memorials, printed and manuscript, were pressed upon Parliament, by which that body was now urged to restore, and now implored to deny, the vacated charter. It was at this juncture that Mather, with two other agents, petitioned the king for a new charter; and the law officers reporting favorably, the plan had already been committed to the Lords of Trade at the time when Phips appeared in London. With the assent of the king, the framing of a new charter was entrusted to Sir George Treby, the Attorney General, who was instructed to fortify the royal prerogative, and to make the jurisdiction include not only Massachusetts, but the territory of New Plymouth and all that region, or the better part of it, lying east of the present State of New Hampshire, and stretching from the St. Lawrence to the Atlantic.

It was the dawn of a new existence, in which the province, as it now came to be called, was to be governed by a royal governor, sent to enforce the royal prerogative, to administer the navigation laws in the interests of British merchants, to gratify the sectaries of the Established Church, and to embarrass the old-fashioned theocracy. The chief power reserved to the people was that of the purse,—an important one in any event, and one that the legislative assembly knew how to wield, as the years which followed proved.

Mather professed to think the new charter—and it perhaps was—the best result, under the circumstances, to be attained. He talked about the colony still having a chance of assuming the old charter at some more opportune moment. Cooke, the champion of the old conditions, was by no means backed in his opposition by a unanimity of feeling in the colony itself; for many of the later comers, generally rich, were become advocates of prerogative, and lived in the hope of obtaining more consequence under a changed order of society. Connecticut and Rhode Island were content, meanwhile, with the preservation of their own chartered autonomy, such as it was.

Thus affairs were taking a turn which made Phips forget the object of his visit. Mather seems to have been prepared for the decision, and was propitiated also by the promise of being allowed to nominate the new governor and his subordinates. Phips had been Mather’s parishioner in Boston, and was ambitious enough to become his creature, if by doing so he could secure preferment. So Sir William Phips was commissioned Governor; and as a sort of concession to the clerical party, of which Mather himself was the leader in Boston, William Stoughton was made Lieutenant-Governor. Isaac Addington became Secretary. Bradstreet was appointed first assistant. Danforth, Oakes, and Cooke, the advocates of the old charter, were forgotten in the distribution of offices.

On Tuesday, January 26, 1692, Robin Orchard came to Boston from Cape Cod, bringing tidings that Capt. Dolberry’s London packet was at anchor in the harbor now known as Provincetown, and that she had brought the news of the appointment of Phips under a new charter.[167]

Boston was at this time the most considerable place in the New World, and she probably had not far from 7,000 inhabitants; while Massachusetts, as now constituted, included 75 towns, of which 17 belonged to Plymouth. Within this enlarged jurisdiction the population ranged somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000,—for estimates widely vary. Out of this number twenty-eight persons had been chosen to make the governor’s council, but their places were to be made good at subsequent elections by the assembly, though the governor could negative any objectionable candidate; and the joint approval of the governor and council was necessary to establish the members of the judiciary. The acts of the legislature could for cause be rejected by the Privy Council any time within three years, and to it they must be regularly submitted for approval; and this proved to be no merely formal action. It meant much.

These conditions created a new political atmosphere for Massachusetts. Religion and politics had in the old days gone hand in hand, and the little book which Joshua Scottow, one of the old patriarchs, now printed, _Old Men’s Tears_, forcibly reminded them of the change. The community was more and more engrossed with trade; and those that concerned themselves with politics were not near so closely of one mind as formerly; and there was lacking that invigorating motive of saving their charter which had so unified the thoughts and banded the energies of the community in former years.

On the 14th of May, 1692, the “Nonesuch” frigate cast anchor in Boston harbor. When Phips and Mather disembarked, eight companies of soldiers received and escorted them to their respective houses. “Made no volleys, because ‘twas Satterday night,” says Sewall, recording the event.[168] The ceremony of inauguration was no sooner over than all parties began to take their bearings; and Mather, not long after,[169] in an election sermon, took occasion to defend the policy of his recent mission. It remained to be seen how much the province was to gain from its closer connection with the home government. Was it to claim and secure larger assistance in repressing Indian outbreaks and repelling French encroachments?—for these things were brought home to them by the arrival of every messenger from the frontiers, by the surveillance under which they had put all Frenchmen who chanced to be in their seaports, and by the loads of wine-casks which paraded the streets of Boston when the “Swan” (September 20, 1692) brought in a French prize. It was not till October 23d that Cooke and Oakes reached home, and the old-charter party had once more its natural leaders; Cooke, at least, bringing to it the influence of wealth.[170]

This is the form of the Great Seal of Massachusetts, used in the time of George I. It was recut, and the name of the monarch changed under George II. This last design will be found in the _Massachusetts House Doc._, no. 345 (1885), being a report on the Arms and Great Seal of Massachusetts. Here, as in the _Heraldic Journal_, vols. i. and ii., the private seals of the royal governors are given, which were used in sealing military commissions.]

In the sermon to which reference has just been made, Mather showed that, however he had carried many of his own points, he had failed in some that much troubled him. The change in the qualification of electors from church membership to the condition of freeholders was alarming to those of the old theocratic sentiments. It meant a diminution of their influence, and that the 120 churches in New England (of which 80 were in Massachusetts) were to direct much less than formerly the legislation of the people. The possible three years which a law might live before the home-veto came must be made the most of. Using his influence with Phips, Mather dictated the choice of the first corporation of Harvard College, freshly chartered under the new rule, and without waiting for the confirmation of the Privy Council, who might well be thought to be opposed to a charter for the college which did not provide some check in a board of visitors, he caused himself, very likely in a passive way, to be made its first Doctor of Divinity, but his admirers and creatures knew the reward he expected. We think, however, to-day less of the legislation which gave such a title to their great man than we do of the smaller ambitions by which the assembly of the province about the same time were originating our public-school system.

The governor, in his communication to the General Court, reminded them of the royal recommendation that they should fix by law a fitting salary for the chief executive. It raised a point that Elisha Cooke was in wait for. Under his instigation, the plan was devised of substituting an annual grant, which might be raised or lowered, as circumstances warranted, and as was necessary to vindicate one of the few rights left to them by the charter. It was the beginning of a conflict that recurred with each successive governor as he attempted to force or cajole the representatives into some recognition of the royal wish.

The baleful influence of the Mathers—for the son Cotton was now conspicuous—conduced to commit the unwary Phips to instituting a court, which disgraced itself by the judicial murders attending the witchcraft frenzy; and in the midst of all, Sir Francis Wheeler’s crippled fleet arrived from the West Indies (June 11, 1693), having lost more than half its men by disease. The fear of infection almost caused a panic among the inhabitants of Boston when, two days later, Wheeler anchored his frigates off Noddle’s Island. Ten days afterwards their commander was entertained at Cambridge by the governor, and by Mather as president of the college.

Connecticut was in the mean while serving both Massachusetts on the east and New York on the west. She sent troops to help defend the eastern dependencies of the Bay. On the retreat of Winthrop’s expedition, New York appealed to Connecticut for help, and she afforded it; but when Governor Fletcher, of New York, came to Hartford and claimed command of her militia, she resisted his pretensions, and, as the story goes, drowned the reading of his proclamation by a vigorous beating of drums.[171] Fitz-John Winthrop was sent to England to compose matters, and it ended in Connecticut placing 120 men at the disposal of the New York governor, while she retained command of her home forces, and Winthrop became in turn her governor.

Phips too went to England, but on a mission not so successful. His testy character had early imperilled his administration. He got into a quarrel with Fletcher, of New York, and he yielded to passions which brought undignified encounters even in the public streets. Representations of such conduct did not fail to reach the king, and Phips was commanded to appear in his own defence. His friends had endeavored to force an address through the House of Representatives, praying the king not to remove him; but it was defeated by the united action of members from Boston, many of whom represented country towns. The governor’s friends resorted to a specious device which appealed to the local pride of the country; and, by the urgency of Mather and others, a bill requiring the representatives to be residents of the town they sat for was forced through the House.[172] With an assembly constituted under the new rule, a bare majority was secured for the address, and Phips took it with him.

Before much progress could be made in the investigation, after his arrival in London, he died on February 18, 1694-5.[173] The news did not reach Boston till early in May. “People are generally sad,” says Sewall. “Cousin Hall says the talk is Mr. Dudley will be governor,” and the next day mourning guns were fired at the Castle.[174]

Joseph Dudley’s hour of pride was not yet come, though he had intrigued for appointment even before Phips’s death. The protests of Ashurst and Constantine Phipps, the colony’s agents in London, were effectual; and the king was by no means prepared as yet to alienate the feelings of his New England subjects in order to gratify the avenging spirit of Dudley. That recusant New Englander was put off with the lieutenant-governorship of the Isle of Wight, a position which he held for nine years.

The government in Boston upon Phips’s leaving had legally fallen into the hands of that old puritan, the lieutenant-governor, William Stoughton, and in his charge it was to remain for four years and more (November, 1694, to May 26, 1699). It was a period which betokened a future not significant of content. It was not long before Thomas Maule could call the ministers and magistrates hard names, and with his quick wit induce a jury to acquit him.[175] But the spirit of Parliament could not be so easily thwarted. As colonists, they had long known what restrictive acts the mother country could impose on their trade in the interests of the stay-at-home merchants, who were willing to see others break the soil of a new country, whose harvests they had no objection to reap. The Parliament of the Commonwealth had first (1651) taken compulsory steps, and the government of the Restoration was not more sparing of the colonists. King William’s Parliament increased the burden, and the better to enforce observance of its laws they established a more efficient agency of espionage than the Plantation Committee of the Privy Council had been, by instituting a new commission in the Lords of Trade (1696), and had followed it up by erecting a Court of Admiralty (1697) to adjudicate upon its restrictive measures.[176] About the same time (1696) they set up Nova Scotia, which had been originally included in the Massachusetts charter of 1691, as a royal province. The war which was waging with France served somewhat to divert attention from these proceedings. French privateers were hovering round the coast, and Boston was repairing her defences.[177] Not a packet came into the Bay from England, but there was alarm, and alertness continued till the vessel’s peaceful character was established. News was coming at one time of Frontenac’s invasion of New York, and at another of Castin’s successes at the eastward. In August, 1696, when Captain Paxton brought word to Boston of Chub’s surrender of Pemaquid, five hundred men were mustered, but they reached Penobscot only to see the French sailing away, and so returned to Boston unrewarded. The enemy also fell on the Huguenot settlement at Oxford, Mass., and the inhabitants abandoned it.[178] When the aged Bradstreet was buried,[179] they had to forego the honor they would pay his memory in mourning guns, because of the scarcity of powder; and good people rejoiced and shivered as word came in June of the scalping exploit of Hannah Dustin at Haverhill, in the preceding March. In the autumn (November 4) there was nothing in all this to prevent the substantial loyalty of the people showing itself in a celebration of the king’s birthday. The Boston town house was illuminated, and the governor and council went with trumpets to Cotton Hill[180] to see the fireworks “let fly,” as they said. No word had yet come of the end of the war, which had been settled by the peace of Ryswick in September. A month later (December 9, 1697) Captain Gillam arrived at Marblehead from London, and the next day, amid the beat of drum and the blare of trumpet, between three and four in the afternoon, the proclamation of the peace was made in Boston. The terms of that treaty were not reassuring for New England. A restitution of captured lands and ports on either side was made by it; but the bounds of Acadia were not defined, and the Sagadahock country became at once disputed ground. The French claimed that it had been confirmed to them by the treaties of St. Germain (1632) and Breda (1668); but the Lords of Trade urged the province to rebuild the forts at Pemaquid, and maintain an ascendency on the spot.

This follows a contemporary engraving preserved in Harvard College library, which is inscribed: “His Excellencie Richard Coote. Earle of Bellomont, Governour of New England, New York and New Hampshire, and Vice Admirall of those seas.” Cf. the picture of doubtful authenticity in the _Memorial History of Boston_, ii. p. 175.]

As early as August, 1695, word had come that Richard Coote, the Earl of Bellomont, was to be the new governor of Massachusetts. Later it was said that he would not arrive till spring; and when spring came the choice had not even been determined upon. It was not till November, 1697, that he was commissioned governor of New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. He landed in New York on the 2d of April, 1698, and on the 12th a sloop reached Boston, bringing tidings of his arrival, and three days later the council received a communication from him. For a year and more he stayed in New York, sending his instructions to Stoughton, who as lieutenant-governor directed the council’s action. On the 26th of May, 1699, the governor reached Boston;[181] and it was not long before he manifested his sympathy with the party of which Elisha Cooke was the leader. This gentleman, who was so obnoxious to the Mather party, had been negatived by Phips, when chosen to the council; but on Phips’s withdrawal, his election had escaped a veto, and he now sat at the council board. Mather had succeeded, in 1697, in forcing upon the legislature a charter, in the main of his own drafting, which gave to Harvard College the constitution that he liked, but he manœuvred in vain to secure his own appointment from the General Court to proceed to England to solicit the sanction of the Privy Council; and it was not long before he found that the new governor had vetoed his charter, and in 1701 the assembly legislated him out of office, as the president of the college.

This first blow to the dominance of the Mathers was reassuring, and Bellomont was a leader for the new life to rally about.[182] He was a man of complacent air. He liked, if we may believe him, to hear sermons well enough to go to King’s Chapel on Sundays, and to the meeting-house for the Thursday lectures. He could patronize the common people with a sufficient suavity; and when the General Court, after their set purpose, voted him a present instead of a salary, if he was not much pleased, he took his £1,000 as the best substitute he could get for the £1,200 which he preferred.

Boston, with its 7,000 inhabitants, was not so bad a seat of a viceroyalty, after all, for a poor earl, who had a living to make, and was debarred the more lucrative methods of trade. He reported back to the Lords of Trade abundant figures of what he found to be the town’s resources and those of his government; but the favor which he was receiving from the good people might have been less had they known that these same reports of his set forth his purpose to find Englishmen, rather than New Englanders, for the offices in his gift.

We have also at this time the report which the scurrilous Ned Ward made of the puritan town and its people;[183] but it is not well to believe all of his talk about the innocence of doves and the subtile wiles of serpents, though life in Boston was not without its contrasts, as we look back upon it now. Samuel Sewall, her first abolitionist, was even then pointing the finger of doom to the insidious evil in his _Selling of Joseph_. Not altogether foreign to the thoughts of many were the political possibilities of the coming century, when on New Year’s Day, 1701, the bellman’s clangor was heard, as he toned Sewall’s memorial verses through the streets. There was a certain fitness in the century being ushered in, for New England at least, by the man who was to make posterity best acquainted with its life, and who as a circuit judge, coursing statedly the country ways, saw more to portray than any one else. Sewall was an honest man, if in many respects a petty one. He had figured in one of the noblest spectacles ever seen in the self-willed puritan capital, when on a fast day, January 14, 1697, he had stood up in the meeting-house, and had listened with bowed head to the reading of his penitential confession for the sin of his complicity in the witchcraft trials. Stoughton, the lieutenant-governor, and chief justice of those trials, was quite another type of the puritan fatalist, from whom it was futile to expect a like contrition; and when, at a later day (December 25, 1698), Stoughton invited to dinner the council and omitted Sewall, who was one of them, one might fancy the cause was in no pleasant associations with the remembrance of that scene in Parson Willard’s meeting-house. It is characteristic of Sewall that this social slight oppressed him for fear that Bellomont, who had not yet come, might hear of it, and count him less! But poor Sewall was a man whom many things disturbed, whether it was that to mock him some one scattered a pack of playing-cards in his fore-yard, or that some of the godly chose to wear a wig![184]

This follows the steel engraving in _Sewall Papers_, vol. i. There is another likeness in _N. E. H. & Gen. Reg._, i. 105. Cf. also Higginson’s _Larger Hist. United States_, p. 208.]

The smiting of the Mathers, to which reference has been made, was a business of serious moment to those theocrats. Whoever was not in sympathy with their protests fared badly in their mouths. “Mr. Cotton Mather,” records Sewall (October 20, 1701), “came to Mr. Wilke’s shop, and there talked very sharply against me, as if I had used his father worse than a neger; spoke so loud that people in the street might hear him.” There is about as near an approach to conscious pleasantry as we ever find in Sewall when, writing, some days later, that he had sent Mr. Increase Mather a haunch of very good venison, he adds, “I hope in that I did not treat him as a negro.”

The Mathers were praised highly and blamed sharply in their lifetime, and have been since. There can be little dispute about what they did and what they said; they were outspoken enough to make their motives and feelings palpable. It is as one makes or refuses allowances for their times that the estimate of their value to their generation is scaled. None ever needed allowances more. They had no conception of those influences which place men in relation to other times than their own. There was in their minds no plane higher than the existence around them,—no plane to which the man of all times leads his contemporaries. Matherism, which was to them their life, was to others a domination, the long-suffering of which, by their coevals, to us of to-day is a study. It would be unjust to say that this mighty influence had not been often of great good; but the gentle observer of an historic character does not contentedly witness outbursts of selfish arrogance, canting humiliation, boastful complacency, to say nothing of social impertinences and public indelicacies, and the bandying of opprobrious epithets in controversy. With this there was indeed mingled much for which New England had reason to be grateful. Increase Mather had a convenient astuteness, which was exerted not infrequently to her no small gain. He had learning, which usually left his natural ability and his education free from entanglements. It was too often quite otherwise with his son Cotton, whose reading smothered his faculties, though he had a native power that occasionally got the upper hand. Between them they gathered a library, which, as John Dunton said, was the glory of New England. The awe which Increase inspired knew little of that lurking rebellion which the too pitiful arrogance of Cotton incited; for the father was essentially a strong and politic man, and though his domination was waning outwardly in 1700, he had the ability to compel the Boston press into a refusal to print the _Gospel Order Revised_, which his opponents had written in answer to his _Order of the Gospel_, and to force his adversaries to flee to New York to find a printer.[185]

The old Mather theocracy was attacked on two sides. There was, in the first place, the defection within the old New England orthodoxy, by which an independent spirit had established a church. From the published manifesto of its principles this came to be known as the “Manifesto Church,” and it had invited Benjamin Colman home from England to become its pastor,[186] who, to avoid difficulties, had been ordained in England. He first preached in November, 1699. In the second place, the organization of the Church of England, which had begun in Andros’s time, was gathering strength, though Sewall got what comfort he could from the fact that Mr. Maccarty’s shop and others were not closed on Christmas Day. Attempts had been made to divert the funds of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England from their application to the needs of the Indians, to strengthen the new Episcopal movement; and the failure to do this, as well as a spirit to emulate the missionary enterprise of the French, had instigated the formation of a new Society in England for Propagating the Gospel in Foreign Parts; but it was not long before its resources were turned into channels which nurtured the Episcopal movement and the royal authority. Strong contrasts to the simplicity of the old order were increasing; and it was not without misgivings that the old people had seen Benjamin Wadsworth, the new associate pastor of the First Church, inducted (1696) into office with an unusual formal parade. Thus the humble manners of the past were becoming in large degree a memory; and when, a little later (June 1, 1702), the new queen was proclaimed, and the representatives were allowed to precede the ministers in the procession, the wail in Sewall’s diary, as well as when he notices the raising of colors at the Castle on the Lord’s Day, betokens in another way the order of things which the new charter was making possible.

While in Massachusetts the defection grew, in Connecticut the old order was entrenching itself in the founding of Yale College, first at Saybrook, and later at New Haven, which was destined, as Harvard declined in the estimation of the orthodox, to become the rallying-point of the old school.[187]

In Rhode Island matters went on much as the heterogeneous composition of that colony necessarily determined. Bellomont could find little good to report of her people, and the burden of his complaint to the Lords of Trade touched their propensity to piracy, their evasion of the laws of trade, and the ignorance of the officials.

Bellomont had returned to his government in New York when, on the 5th of March, 1701, he died. It took ten days for the news to reach Boston (March 15), and four days later (March 19) word came by the roundabout channel of Virginia of the declaration of war between England and France. In the midst of the attendant apprehension, on April 7th, mourning guns were fired for the dead governor at the Sconce and at the Castle, and the artillery company gave three volleys in the middle of the town, Col. Townshend, as Sewall in his antipathy does not fail to record, wearing a wig!

When Bellomont had left for New York in May, 1700, the immediate charge of the government had again fallen upon Stoughton. He did not long survive his chief, and died July 7, 1701, in his seventieth year,[188] and from this time to the coming of Dudley the council acted as executive.

It was on Joseph Dudley, to a large party the most odious of all New Englanders, the ally of Andros, that the thoughts of all were now turned. It was known that he had used every opportunity to impress upon the king his fitness to maintain the royal prerogative and protect the revenue in New England. The people of Boston had not seen him for about ten years. In 1691 he had landed there on his way to New York, where he was to serve as a councillor; and during that and the following year he had made some unobtrusive visits to his home in Roxbury, till, in 1693, he was recalled to England to be made lieutenant-governor of the Isle of Wight. With the death of Bellomont his hopes again rose. Ashurst, as the senior of the Massachusetts agents, still opposed him, though his associate, Constantine Phipps,[189] was led to believe that the king might do worse than appoint the aspirant. Dudley was not deficient in tact, and he got some New Englanders who chanced to be in England to recommend him; and a letter, which he used to some purpose, came not surprisingly, considering his lineage, from Cotton Mather, saying quite enough in Dudley’s praise. Elisha Cooke and his friends were not ignorant of such events, and secured the appointment of Wait Winthrop as agent to organize a fresh opposition to Dudley’s purposes. It was too late. The letters which Dudley offered in testimony were powerful enough to remove the king’s hesitancy, and Dudley secured his appointment, which, on the death of the king a few days later, was promptly confirmed by Anne.[190]

The news of the king’s death and the accession of the queen reached Boston, by way of Newfoundland, on the 28th of May, 1702.[191] The new monarch was at once proclaimed from the town house, and volleys of guns and the merriment of carouse marked a new reign. How New England was to find the change was soon sharply intimated. Amid it all tidings came of the capture of three Salem ketches by the Cape Sable Indians. Later in the same day the eyes of Madam Bellingham, the relict of an early governor, were closed in death, severing one of the last links of other days. Her death was to most a suggestive accompaniment of the mischance which now placed in the governor’s chair the recusant son of Thomas Dudley, that other early governor.

A fortnight later (June 10, 1702), the ship “Centurion,” having Joseph Dudley on board, put in at Marblehead, and the news quickly travelled to Boston. The next day a committee of the council went in Captain Croft’s pinnace to meet him, and they boarded the “Centurion” just outside Point Alderton. Dudley received them on deck, arrayed in a very large wig, as Sewall sorrowfully noted while making him a speech. They saw another man whom they had not heard of, one Thomas Povey, who was to be their lieutenant governor, and to have charge of their Castle. They saw, too, among the passengers, George Keith, the whilom quaker, who was come over on £200 salary, very likely paid by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, to convert as many as he could to prelacy.[192] Sewall was not happy during that day of compliments. The party landed at Scarlet’s Wharf amid salvos of artillery, and under escort of the council and the town regiment they proceeded to the town house, where the commissions were published and all “had a large treat,” as Sewall says. Major Hobby’s coach, with six horses, was at the door, a guard of horsemen wheeled into ranks, and so Dudley went to that Roxbury home, whence, as many remembered, he had been taken to be imprisoned.

Dudley was not deficient in confidence and forwardness; but he had no easy task before him. He naturally inclined to the faction of which Byfield and Leverett were leaders; but the insidious and envious Cotton Mather, taking him into his confidence, warned him of these very people. Dudley told them of the warning, and it was not long before the sanctimonious Mather was calling his excellency a “wretch.”

When Dudley made his opening address to the General Court,[193] he could not refrain from saying some things that were not very conciliatory. There were two points on which he raised issues, which he never succeeded in compassing. One of these was a demand for a stated salary. The assembly answered it with a present of £500 against the £1,000 which they had given to Bellomont. No urgency, no threats, no picturing the displeasure of the Crown, could effect his purpose.[194] The war which he waged with the representatives never, as long as the province existed, ended in a peace, though there was an occasional truce under pressure of external dangers.

Another of Dudley’s pleas was for the rebuilding of the fort at Pemaquid, to secure possession of the disputable territory between the Kennebec and Acadia.[195] The deputies were immovable. If the Crown wished to secure that region, it must do it by other sacrifices than those of New England.

Thus thwarted, Dudley could make them feel that the royal governor had some prerogatives; and so he rejected the councillors which the deputies accredited. All of this thrust and parry was of course duly reported by Dudley to the home government. The situation was perplexing in the extreme, quite as much so to the governor as to the people, who reluctantly received him. It was for the interests of both that the war against the French should not flag, and money was necessary, but the governor claimed the direction of expenditures, while the representatives stood aloof and firm on the “privilege and right of English subjects to raise and dispose of money, according to the present exigency of affairs.” With the clergy and the ministers, Dudley was not less unhappily placed. His interests turned him to the church people, but they could not find that his profession had any constancy. His lineage placed him with the Congregationalists, and he once had the ministry in view, but his sympathies went altogether with the new school, of which Stoddard, of Northampton, was leader in the west, while Colman, the Leveretts, and the Brattles were the spokesmen in Boston. In the election of a president for Harvard, Dudley favored Leverett, the successful candidate, and made a Latin speech at his installation,[196] and Cotton Mather writhed at the disappointment of his own hopes. The governor encountered (1708), for his decisive opposition to the Mathers, a terrible but overwrought letter from the father, and a livelier epistle from the son. He showed in his reply a better temper, if nothing more.[197] In the opinion of all honest patriots, of whatever party, Dudley was later found in company which raised suspicions. The conflict with France begat, as wars do, a band of miscreants ever ready to satisfy their avarice by trading with the enemy and furnishing them with arms. Dudley did not escape suspicion, and he experienced some of the bitterest abuse in talk and pamphlet,[198] though the council and the House, the latter after some hesitancy, pronounced the charges against him a “scandalous accusation.” It can hardly be determined that he was implicated, and Palfrey gives him the benefit of the doubt.[199]

This likeness of the leader of the assault on Deerfield follows one given in Daniel’s _Nos Gloires Nationales_, i. p. 278, where is an account of the Hertel family. He was thirty-four at the time of his attack.]

The war was a fearful one. In 1703, month by month fresh tidings of its horrors among the frontier towns reached Boston. In January it was of Berwick, in Maine. In February came sad tidings from Haverhill. In March there was the story of Deerfield, and how Hertel de Rouville had dashed upon the village. With the early summer Dudley went to Canso to confer with the Indians (June 20); and not long after (July 8), Bombazeen, a noted Indian, appeared in Boston with rumors of the French landing near Pemaquid. In August there were sad messages from Wells, and Capt. Southack was sent off by sea with chaplain and surgeon. With all this need of her troops at home, the colony also despatched two companies of foot to help the British forces at Jamaica. Samuel Sewall mourned as ever, when on Sunday (April 23, 1704) great guns at the Castle signalized the Coronation-Day. “Down Sabbath! Up St. George!” he says. The very next day the first number of the _Boston News-Letter_ (April 24)[200] brought to the minister’s study and to his neighbor’s keeping-room the gossip and news of the town which was witnessing this startling proof of progress. Ten days later Dudley signed Benjamin Church’s instructions (May 4), and the old soldier, whose exploits in Philip’s war were not forgotten, set off by land to Piscataqua, where he was met by Cyprian Southack in his brigantine, who carried him to the eastern garrisons. In the _News-Letter_, people read of the tribulations at Lancaster; of the affairs at Port Royal; of the new cannon which Dudley got from England for the Castle; of the French captives, whose presence in Boston so disturbed the selectmen that they petitioned the governor to restrain the strangers, and whose imagined spiritual needs prompted Cotton Mather to print in his tentative French his _Le vrai patron des saines paroles_.

News of this sort was varied by a rumor (December 18, 1705), which a sloop from the English Plymouth had brought, that Sir Charles Hobby was to be made governor,—which meant that the agents of the colony in London were trying to oust Dudley with a new man; but in this they failed.

The war made little progress. The expedition against Port Royal in 1707 was a failure, and the frontier towns were still harassed. The news of Marlborough’s victories was inspiriting, and Boston could name a part of its main thoroughfare after the great soldier; but while she planted guns on her out-wharves and hoisted a tar-barrel to her beacon’s top, and while Colonel Vetch marshalled her troops,[201] she waited in vain for the English army to arrive, in concert with which the New England forces were to make a renewed attack on Port Royal in 1709. Rhode Island sent her war-vessels and two hundred men, and they too lay listlessly in Nantasket roads. Schuyler, of Albany, meanwhile started to conduct four Mohawks or Maqua chiefs to England, where he hoped to play upon the imagination of the queen; and in August, while the weary New Englanders were waiting for the signal to embark, Schuyler brought the savages to Boston, and Colonel Hobby’s regiment was mustered for their diversion.[202] Very likely they were taken to see the “celebrated Cotton Mather,” as the man who had not long before “brought in another tongue to confess the great Saviour of the world,” as he himself said of a tract in the language of the Iroquois, which he had printed in Boston (1707) and supplied to the Dutch and English traders among that people. Distractions and waiting wore away the time; but the English forces never came, and another Port Royal attempt proved wretchedly futile.

That autumn (October, 1709) the New England governors met at Rehoboth, and prepared an address to the queen urging another attempt. In the face of these events the Massachusetts colony had to change its London agent. Sir Henry Ashurst died, and the House would have chosen Sir William Ashurst against Dudley’s protest, if Sir William would have accepted. They now selected their own Jeremiah Dummer, but against his desires.

The year 1710 opened with rumors from Albany about preparations in Canada for an onset along the frontier, and it was not till July (15) that flags and guns at the Castle and Sconce, with drum-beats throughout the streets, told the expectant Bostonians that General Nicholson, who was to head a new expedition, had arrived. It was candle-light before he landed, and the letters and despatches at once busied the government. A little later the council (July 24) entertained that commander, with Vetch and Hobby, at the Green Dragon Tavern; and four days afterwards Governor Saltonstall, from Connecticut, reached Boston, and the contingent of that colony, three hundred men, was on the spot in four weeks from the warning. In September the armament sailed,—twelve ships-of-war and twenty-four transports, of which fourteen carried Massachusetts troops, two New Hampshire, three Rhode Island, and five those of Connecticut. On the 26th of October (1710), Nicholson and his force were back in Boston, flushed with the triumph which the capitulation of Port Royal had given them.[203] The town had need of some such divertissement. There had been a scarcity of grain, and when Captain Belcher attempted to despatch a ship laden with it the mob cut her rudder, and the excitement had not passed without more or less inflaming of the passions. The circle of Matherites had also disturbed the equanimity of the liberals in theology by an anonymous document, _Question and Proposals_, which aimed at ecclesiasticising everybody and everything,—a stroke of a dying cause. There was an antagonist equal to the occasion in John Wise, of Ipswich, and the Mather dynasty had less chance of revival after Wise’s book _The Churches’ Quarrel Espoused_ was launched upon the town.[204]

Nicholson, again in England, had urged the new tory government under Bolingbroke to make a more determined assault on Canada, and Dummer had united with him in a petition to the queen[205] for a royal armament to be sent for the work. Their plea was recognized and what seemed a great force was despatched. Nicholson, with the van of the fleet, arrived on the 6th of June, 1711,[206] and a convention of the New England governors was straightway called at New London to arrange for the campaign. The plan was for Nicholson to lead four thousand men by way of Albany, and the Connecticut contingent of three hundred and sixty men was to make part of this force. The royal ships came straggling into Boston harbor. On the 24th General Hill, who brought under his command seven of Marlborough’s veteran regiments, arrived, and the next day Sewall and others of the council boarded the “Devonshire” and exchanged courtesies with Hill and the admiral of the fleet, Sir Hovenden Walker. The Boston regiments mustered and escorted them to the town house, and the veterans were thrown into a camp on Noddle’s Island. The next six weeks were busy ones, with preparations and entertainments. Mr. Borland, a wealthy merchant, took Hill into his house. The governor offered official courtesies. The transports as they came up into the inner harbor presented a “goodly, charming prospect,” as Sewall thought.[207]

Commencement at Cambridge came on July 4, and all the dignitaries were there. One day some Connecticut Indians exhibited themselves before the admiral, and on another some Mohawks danced on board the flag-ship. By the end of the month, everything was as nearly ready as could be,[208] and the fleet sailed (July 30). They went proudly away, hastened somewhat by large desertions, which the patrolling of the roads leading from Boston had not prevented.

Fac-simile of a cut (pl. xxviii.) in Luard’s _Hist. of the Dress of the British Soldier_, London, 1852, p. 94. It represents the soldiers of Marlborough’s wars.]

Nicholson dallied in Boston for a week or two, eating good dinners, and then started for New York, to take the conduct of the land expedition, Saltonstall accompanying the Connecticut troops as far as Albany. Much farther no one of the land forces went, for word reached them of the sad disaster on the St. Lawrence and of the withdrawal of Walker’s fleet. The New England part of it came straggling back to Boston in October to find the town suffering under the loss of a great fire, which had happened on the night of October 2-3; most unmistakably the result, as Increase Mather told them in a sermon,—and perhaps believed,—of the way in which, during the fitting of the fleet, they had carried bundles on the Lord’s Day, and done other servile work! The cause of the expedition’s failure can be more reasonably indicated: delay in starting, an ill-organized method of supplies, bad pilotage, and incompetent leaders. Walker and Hill sailed direct for England, and in October, while the deputies of the province were bolstering their courage in asking the monarch for another attempt, the English mind was being filled with charges of want of proper coöperation on the part of the New Englanders as the all-sufficient cause of the disaster. Dummer, in London, vindicated his people as well as he could in a _Letter to a Noble Lord concerning the late expedition to Canada_.[209]

In August of the following year (1712) Bolingbroke made a truce with France, the news of which reached Boston from Newfoundland in October (24th). It resulted in the following spring (March 31, 1713) in the Treaty of Utrecht, by which England acquired Acadia with its “ancient limits,” whatever they might be, for we shall see it was a question. The news arrived amid another corn panic. Two hundred angry and perhaps hungry men broke open Arthur Mason’s storehouse and seized the stock of grain. Capt. Belcher sent off another shipload, despite the remonstrance of the selectmen; but the mob stopped short of pulling down Belcher’s house about his ears. “Hardest fend off,” was his word.

Peace secured, Dudley despatched from Boston, November 6, 1713, John Stoddard and John Williams to proceed to Albany, thence by Lake Champlain to Quebec, to negotiate with Vaudreuil for the restoration of prisoners.[210]

* * * * *

The Mason claim[211] to the province of New Hampshire had been bought by Samuel Allen, a London merchant, and he had become its governor; but the active ruler was his son-in-law, John Usher, who had been the treasurer of Andros’s government, and also, as lieutenant-governor, lived in the province. Memories of old political affiliations had not conduced to make his relations with Sir William Phips, of the neighboring jurisdiction, very agreeable. When Bellomont came he was commissioned to take New Hampshire within his government; and it had fallen in the same way to Dudley’s care. This Boston governor found himself popular in New Hampshire, whose people had opposed the reinstatement of Usher, though this had been accomplished in their spite. Dudley and Usher recriminated, and told their respective grievances, and both made their counter-charges to the home government.[212] Affairs went uncomfortably enough till George Vaughan became the successor of Usher, who now withdrew to Medford, in Massachusetts, where he died at the age of eighty, in 1726.