WINNING THE CHARTERS

The accession of Charles II to the throne of England provoked a crisis in the affairs of the Puritans and gave rise to many problems that the New Englanders had not anticipated and did not know how to solve. With a Stuart again in control, there were many questions that might be easily asked but less easily answered. Except for Massachusetts and Plymouth, not a settlement had a legal title to its soil; and except for Massachusetts, not one had ever received a sufficient warrant for the government which it had set up. Naturally, therefore, there was disquietude in Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Haven; and even Massachusetts, buttressed as she was, feared lest the King might object to many of the things she had done. Entrenched behind her charter and aware of her superiority in wealth, territory, and population, she had taken the leadership in New England and had used her opportunity to intimidate her neighbors. Except for New Haven, not a colony or group of settlements but had felt the weight of her claims. Plymouth and Connecticut had protested against her demands; the Narragansett towns with difficulty had evaded her attempt to absorb them; and the settlements at Piscataqua and on the Maine coast had finally yielded to her jurisdiction. As long as Cromwell lived and the Government of England was under Puritan direction, Massachusetts had little to fear from protests against her; but, with the Cromwellian regime at an end, she could not expect from the restored monarchy a favoring or friendly attitude.

The change in England was not merely one of government; it was one of policy as well. Even during the Cromwellian period, Englishmen awoke to a greater appreciation of the importance of colonies as assets of the mother country, and began to realize, in a fashion unknown to the earlier period, the necessity of extending and strengthening England’s possessions in America. England was engaged in a desperate commercial war with Holland, whose vessels had obtained a monopoly of the carrying trade of the world; and to win in that conflict it was imperative that her statesmen should husband every resource that the kingdom possessed. The religious agitations of previous years were passing away and the New England colonies were not likely to be troubled on account of their Puritanism. The great question in England was not religious conformity but national strength based on commercial prosperity.

Thus England was fashioning a new system and defining a new policy. By means of navigation acts, she barred the Dutch from the carrying trade and confined colonial commerce in large part to the mother country. She established councils and committees of trade and plantations, and, by the seizure of New Netherland in 1664 and the grant of the Carolinas and the Bahamas in 1663 and 1670, she completed the chain of her possessions in America from New England to Barbados. A far-flung colonial world was gradually taking shape, demanding of the King and his advisers an interest in America of a kind hitherto unknown. It is not surprising that so vast a problem, involving the trade and defense of nearly twenty colonies, should have made the internal affairs of New England seem of less consequence to the royal authorities than had been the case in the days of Charles I and Archbishop Laud, when the obtaining of the Massachusetts Bay charter had roused such intensity of feeling in England. What was interesting Englishmen was no longer the matter of religious obedience in the colonies, but rather that of their political and commercial dependence on the mother country.

As the future of New England was certain to be debated at Whitehall after 1660, the colonies took pains to have representatives on the ground to meet criticisms and complaints, to ward off attacks, and to beg for favors. Rhode Island sent a commission to Dr. John Clarke, one of her founders and leading men, at that time in London, instructing him to ask for royal protection, self-government, liberty of conscience, and a charter. Massachusetts sent Simon Bradstreet and the Reverend John Norton, with a petition that reads like a sermon, praying the King not to listen to other men’s words but to grant the colonists an opportunity to answer for themselves, they being “true men, fearers of God and the King, not given to change, orthodox and peaceable in Israel.” Connecticut, with more worldly wisdom, sent John Winthrop, the Governor, a man courtly and tactful, with a petition shrewdly worded and to the point. Plymouth entrusted her mission also to Winthrop, hoping for a confirmation of her political and religious liberties. All protested their loyalty to the Crown, while Massachusetts, her petition signed by the stiff-necked Endecott, prostrated herself at the royal feet, craving pardon for her boldness, and subscribing herself “Your Majesties most humble subjects and suppliants.” Did Endecott remember, we wonder, a certain incident connected with the royal ensign at Salem?

Against the lesser colonies no complaints were presented, except in the case of New Haven, which was charged by the inhabitants of Shelter Island with usurpation of their goods and territory; but for Massachusetts the restoration of the Stuarts opened a veritable Pandora’s box of troubles. In “divers complaints, petitions, and other informations concerning New England,” she was accused of overbearance and oppression, of seizing the territory of New Hampshire and Maine, of denying the rights of Englishmen to Anglicans and non-freemen of the colony, and of persecuting the Quakers and others of religious views different from her own. She was declared to be seeking independence of Crown and Parliament by forbidding appeals to England, refusing to enforce the oath of allegiance to the King, and in general exceeding the powers laid down in her charter. The new plantations council, commissioned by the King in December, 1660, sent a peremptory letter the following April ordering the colony to proclaim the King “in the most solemn manner,” and to hold herself in readiness to answer complaints by appointing persons well instructed to represent her before itself in England. At the same time, it begged the King to go slowly, giving Massachusetts an opportunity to be heard, and to write a letter “with all possible tenderness,” pointing out that submission to the royal authority was absolutely essential. This the King did, confirming the charter of Massachusetts, renewing the colony’s rights and privileges, and in conciliatory fashion ascribing all dérélictions of duty to the iniquity of the times rather than to any evil intention of the heart. Then declaring that the chief aim of the charter was liberty of conscience, the King struck at the very heart of the Massachusetts system, by commanding the magistrates to grant full liberty of worship to members of the Anglican Church and the right to vote to all who were “orthodox” in religion and possessed of “competent estates.” Though this order was evaded by various definitions of “orthodox” and “competent estates” and was not to be fully executed for many years, yet its meaning was clear no single religious body would ever again be allowed, by the royal authorities in England, to monopolize the government or control the political destinies of a British colony in America or elsewhere.

The policy thus adopted toward Massachusetts became even more conciliatory when applied to the other colonies. It is not improbable that the King’s advisers saw in the strengthening of Connecticut and Rhode Island an opportunity to check the power of Massachusetts and to reduce her importance in New England. However that may be, they lent themselves to the efforts that Winthrop and Clarke were making to obtain charters for their respective colonies. These agents were able, discreet, and broadminded men. Clarke, a resident in England for a number of years, had acquired no little personal influence; and Winthrop, as an old-time friend of the English lords and gentlemen whose governor he had been at Saybrook, could count on the help of the one surviving member of that group, Lord Saye and Sele, who was a privy councillor, a member of the House of Lords and of the plantations council, and, as we are told, Lord Privy Seal, a position that would be of direct service in expediting the issue of a charter. Winthrop had personal qualities, also, that made for success. He was a university man, had made the grand tour of the Continent, and was familiar with official traditions and the ways of the court. Soon after his arrival in England, he became a member of the Royal Society and served on several of its committees, and thus had an opportunity of making friends and of showing his interest in other things than theology. If Cotton Mather was rightly informed, Winthrop was accorded a personal interview with Charles II and presented the King with a ring which Charles I, as Prince of Wales, had given his grandfather, Adam Winthrop.

Winthrop made good use of a good cause. Connecticut had behaved herself well and had incurred no ill-will. She had had no dealings with the Cromwellian Government, had dutifully proclaimed the King, had been discreet in her attitude toward Whalley and Goffe, the régicides who had fled to New England, and had aroused no resentment against herself among her neighbors. With proceedings once begun, the securing of the charter went rapidly forward. Winthrop at first petitioned for a confirmation of the old Warwick patent, which had been purchased of the English lords and gentlemen in 1644, but later, encouraged it may be by friends in England, he asked for a charter. The request was granted. The document gave to Connecticut the same boundaries as those of the old patent, and conferred powers of government identical with those of the Fundamental Orders of 1639. That the main features of the charter were drawn up in the colony before Winthrop sailed is probable, though it is not impossible that they were drafted in London by Winthrop himself. All that the English officials did was to give the text its proper legal form.

After the receipt of the charter and its proclamation in the colony and after a slight readjustment of the government to meet the few changes required, the general court of Connecticut proceeded to enforce the full territorial rights of the colony. The men of Connecticut had made up their minds, now that the charter had come, to execute its terms to the uttermost and to extend the authority of the colony to the farthest bounds, so that, next to the government of the Bay, Connecticut might be the greatest in New England. The court took under its protection the towns of Stamford and Greenwich, and on the ground that the whole territory westward was within its jurisdiction warned the Dutch governor not to meddle. It accepted the petition of Southold on Long Island and of certain residents of Guilford, both of the New Haven federation, for annexation, and, sending a force to Long Island to demand the surrender of the western towns there, it seized Captain John Scott, who was planning to establish a separate government over them, and brought him to Hartford for trial. It informed the towns of Mystic and Pawcatuck, lying in the disputed land between Connecticut and Rhode Island, that they were in the Connecticut colony and must henceforth conduct their affairs according to its laws. The relations with Rhode Island were to be a matter of later adjustment, and no immediate trouble followed; but Stuyvesant, the Dutch Governor, protested angrily against Connecticut’s claim to Dutch territory and brought the matter to the attention of the commissioners of the United Colonies. On one pretext or another, the latter delayed action; and the matter was not settled until England’s seizure of New Amsterdam in 1664 brought the Dutch rule to an end and made operative the royal grant of the territory to the Duke of York, thus stopping Connecticut in her somewhat headlong career westward and taking from her the whole of Long Island and all the land west of the Connecticut River. If maintained, this grant would have reduced the colony by half and would have materially retarded its progress; but Connecticut eventually saved the western portion of her territory as far as the line of 1650. However, her people could do no more crowding on into the region beyond, for the province of New York now lay directly across the path of her westward expansion.

But with New Haven her success was complete. That unfortunate colony, which had made an effort to obtain a patent in 1645, when the “great ship,” bearing the agent Gregson, had foundered with all on board, had no friends at court, and had been too poor after 1660 to join the other colonies in sending an agent to London. Consequently its right to exist as an independent government was not considered in the negotiations which Winthrop had carried on. Serious complaints had been raised against it; its rigorous theocratic policy had created divisions among its own people, many of whom had begun to protest; it had been friendly with the Cromwellian regime and had proclaimed Charles II unwillingly and after long delay; it had protected the régicides until the messengers sent out for their capture could report the colony as “obstinate and pertinacious in contempt of His Majestie.” Governor Leete, of the younger generation, was not in sympathy with Davenport’s persistent refusal of all overtures from Hartford, and would probably have favored union under the charter of 1662 if Connecticut had been less aggressive in her attitude. As it was, the controversy became pungent and was prolonged for more than two years, though the outcome was never uncertain. The New Haven colony was poor, unprotected, and divided against itself. Its population was decreasing; Indian massacres threatened its frontiers; the malcontents of Guilford, led by Bray Rossiter, were demanding immediate and unconditional surrender to Connecticut; and finally in 1664 the successful capture of New Netherland and the grant to the Duke of York threatened the colony with annexation from that quarter. Rather than be joined to New York, New Haven surrendered. One by one the towns broke away until in December of that year only Branford, Guilford, and New Haven remained. On December 13, 1664, the freemen of these towns, with a few others, voted to submit, “as from a necessity ... but with a salvo jure of our former right & claime, as a people who have not yet been heard in point of plea.”

The New Haven federation was dissolved; Davenport withdrew to Boston, where he became a participant in the religious life of that colony; and the strict Puritans of Branford, Guilford, and Milford, led by Abraham Pierson, went to New Jersey and founded Newark. The towns, left loose and at large, joined Connecticut voluntarily and separately, and the New Haven colony ceased to exist. But the dual capital of Connecticut and the alternate meetings of its legislature in Hartford and New Haven, marked for more than two hundred years the twofold origin of the colony and the state.

In the meantime Rhode Island had become a legally incorporated colony. Even before Winthrop sailed for England, Dr. John Clarke had received a favorable reply to his petition for a charter. But a year passed and nothing was done about the matter, probably owing to the arrival of Winthrop and the feeling of uncertainty aroused by the conflicting boundary claims, which involved a stretch of some twenty-five miles of territory between Narragansett Bay and the Pawcatuck River. A third claimant also appeared, the Atherton Company, with its headquarters in Boston, which had purchased lands of the Indians at various points in the area and held them under the jurisdiction of Massachusetts. When Clarke heard that Winthrop, in drawing the boundaries for the Connecticut charter of 1662, had included this Narragansett territory, he protested vehemently to the King, saying that Connecticut had “injuriously swallowed up the one-half of our colonie,” and demanding a reconsideration. Finally, after the question had been debated in the presence of Clarendon and others, the decision was reached to give Rhode Island the boundaries and charter she desired, but to leave the question of conflicting claims for later settlement. Evidently Winthrop, though not agreeing with Clarke in matters of fact regarding the boundaries, supported Rhode Island’s appeal for a charter, for Clarendon said afterwards that the draft which Clarke presented had in it expressions that were disliked, but that the charter was granted out of regard for Winthrop.

The Rhode Island charter passed the seals July 8, 1663, and was received in the colony four months later with great joy and thanksgiving. It created a common government for all the towns, guaranteeing full liberty “in religious concernments” and freedom from all obligations to conform to the “litturgy, formes, and ceremonyes of the Church of England, or take or subscribe the oathes and articles made and established in that behalfe.” This may have been the phrase that Clarendon, who was a High Churchman, objected to when the draft was presented. The form of government was similar in all essential particulars to that of Connecticut.

Rhode Island’s enthusiasm in obtaining a charter is not difficult to understand. That amphibious colony, consisting of mainland, islands, and a large body of water, was inhabited by “poor despised peasants,” as Governor Brenton described them, “living remote in the woods” and subject to the “envious and subtle contrivances of our neighbour colonies round about us, who are in a combination united together to swallow us up.” The colony had not been asked to join the New England Confederation, and its leaders were convinced that the members of the Confederation were in league to filch away their lands and, by driving them into the sea, to eliminate the colony altogether. Plymouth, seeking a better harbor than that of Plymouth Bay, claimed the eastern mainland as well as the chief islands, Hog, Conanicut, and Aquidneck; Massachusetts claimed Pawtuxet, Warwick, and the Narragansett country generally; while Connecticut wished to push her eastern boundary as far beyond the Pawcatuck River (the present boundary) as she might be able to do. Had each of these colonies made good its claim, there would have been little left of Rhode Island, and we do not wonder that the settlers looked upon themselves as fighting, with their backs to the sea, for their very existence. Hence they welcomed the charter with the joy of one relieved of a great burden, for, though the boundary question remained unsettled, the charter assured the colony of its right to exist under royal protection.