John Winthrop and the Cambridge Agreement
But events were moving rapidly in England. Between March, 1629, and March,
1630, Parliament was dissolved under circumstances of great excitement,
parliamentary privileges were set aside, parliamentary leaders were sent
to the Tower, and the period of royal rule without Parliament began. The
heavy hand of an autocratic government fell on all those within reach who
upheld the Puritan cause, among whom was John Winthrop, a country squire,
forty-one years of age, who was deprived of his office as attorney in the
Court of Wards. Disillusioned as to life in England because of financial
losses and family bereavements, and now barred from his customary
employment by act of the Government, he turned his thoughts toward
America. Acting with the approval of the Earl of Warwick and in
conjunction with a group of Puritan friends — Thomas Dudley, Isaac
Johnson, Richard Saltonstall, and John Humphrey,— he decided in the summer
of 1629 to leave England forever, and in September he joined the
Massachusetts Bay Company. Almost immediately he showed his capacity for
leader, ship, was soon elected governor, and was able during the following
winter to obtain such a control of affairs as to secure a vote in favor of
the transfer of charter and company to New England. The official
organization was remodeled so that only those desiring to remove should be
in control, and on March 29, 1630, the company with its charter,
accompanied by a considerable number of prospective colonists, set sail
from Cowes near the Isle of Wight in four vessels, the Arabella, the
Talbot, the Ambrose, and the Jewel, the remaining passengers following in
seven other vessels a week or two later. The voyages of the vessels were
long, none less than nine weeks, by way of the Azores and the Maine coast,
and the distressed Puritans, seven hundred altogether, scurvy-stricken and
reduced in numbers by many deaths, did not reach Salem until June and
July. Hence they moved on to Charlestown, set up their tents on the slope
of the hill, and on the 23rd of August, held the first official meeting of
the company on American soil; but finding no running water in the place
and still pursued by sickness and death, they again removed, this time to
Boston, where they built houses against the winter. With the founding of
this colony — the colony of Massachusetts Bay — a new era for New England
began.
JOHN WINTHROP
Painting by Charles Osgood, 1834, copied from the original in the
State House, Boston. In the collection of the Massachusetts Historical
Society, Boston.
This grant of territory to the Massachusetts Bay Company and of the
charter confirming the title and conveying powers of government put a
complete stop to Gorges's plans for a final proprietorship in New England.
Gorges had acquiesced in the first grant by the New England Council
because he thought it a sub-grant, like that to Plymouth, in no way
injuring his own control. But when in 1632, he learned the true inwardness
of the Massachusetts title and discovered that Warwick and the Puritans
had outwitted him by obtaining royal confirmation of a grant that
extinguished his own proprietary rights, he turned on Warwick, declared
that the charter had been surreptitiously obtained, and demanded that it
be brought to the Council board. Learning that it had gone to New England,
he forced the withdrawal of Warwick from the Council, and from that time
forward for five years bent all his efforts to overthrow the Puritan
colony by obtaining the annulment of its privileges.
In this attempt, he was aided by Captain John Mason, an able,
energetic promoter of colonizing movements who had already been concerned
with settlements in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, and who was zealous to
begin a plantation in the province of Maine. Mason had received grants
from the Council, both individually and in partnership with Gorges, and
had visited New England in the interest of his claims. Through the
influence of Gorges, he was now made a member of the Council and joined in
the movement to break the hold of the Puritans upon New England. He and
Gorges found useful allies in three men who had been driven out of
Massachusetts by the Puritan leaders soon after their arrival at Boston —
Thomas Morton of Merrymount, Sir Christopher Gardiner, a picturesque,
somewhat mysterious personage thought to have been an agent of Gorges in
New England, with methods and morals that gave offense to Massachusetts,
and Philip Ratcliffe, a much less worthy character given to scandal and
invective, who had been deprived of his ears by the Puritan authorities.
These men were bitter in their denunciation of the Puritan government.
The situation was perilous for the new colony, which was hardly yet
firmly established. In direct violation of the royal commands, hundreds of
men and women were leaving England — not merely adventurers or humble
Separatists, but sober people of the better classes, of mature years and
substantial characters. When, therefore, Gorges and the others meeting at
Gorges's house at Plymouth brought their complaints to the attention of
the Privy Council, they were listened to with attention, and instructions
were sent at once to stop the Puritan ships and to bring the charter of
the Massachusetts Company to the Council board. To check the Puritan
migration and to institute further inquiry into the facts of the case a
commission was appointed in 1634, with Archbishop Laud at its head, for
the special purpose, among others, of revoking charters "surreptitiously
and unduly obtained." Gorges and Morton appealed to Laud against the
Puritans, and Morton wrote his New England Canaan, which he dedicated to
Laud, in the hope of exposing the motives of the colony and of arousing
the Archbishop to action. Warwick threw his influence on the side of
Massachusetts, being always forward, as Winthrop said, "to do good to our
colony"; and the colony itself, fearing attack, began to fortify Castle
Island in the harbor and to prepare for defense. Endecott, in wrath,
defaced the royal ensign at Salem, and so intense was the excitement and
so determined the attitude of the Puritans that, had the Crown attempted
to send over a Governor-General or to seize the charter by force, the
colony would have resisted to the full extent of its power.
Gorges, believing that he could work better through the King and the
Archbishop than through the New England Council, brought about the
dissolution of that body in 1635, thus making it possible for the King to
deal directly with the New England situation. Before its dissolution the
Council had authorized Morton, acting as its lawyer, to bring the case to
the attention of the Attorney-General of England, who filed in the Court
of King's Bench a complaint against Massachusetts, as a result of which a
writ of quo warranto was issued against the Company.
The outlook was ominous for Puritanism, not only in New England but
in old England as well. That year saw the flight of the greatest number of
emigrants across the sea, for the persecution in England was at its
height, the Puritan aristocracy was suffering in its estates, and Puritan
divines were everywhere silenced or dismissed. Even Warwick was shorn of a
part of his power. Young Henry Vane, son of a baronet, had already gone to
America, and such men as Lord Saye and Sele, Lord Brooke, and Sir Arthur
Haslerigg were thinking of migrating and had prepared a refuge at Saybrook
where they might find peace. But the turn of the tide soon came. The royal
Government was bankrupt, the resistance to the payment of ship-money was
already making itself felt, and disturbances in the central and eastern
counties were absorbing the attention and energies of the Government.
Gorges, left alone to execute the writ against the colony, joined with
Mason in building a ship for the purpose of carrying the quo warranto to
New England, but the vessel broke in the launching, and their resources
were at an end. Mason died in 1635, and Gorges, an old man of seventy,
bankrupt and discouraged, could do no more. Though Morton continued the
struggle, and though, in 1638, the Committee of the Council for Foreign
Plantations (the Laud Commission) again demanded the charter, the danger
was past: conditions in England had become so serious for the King that
the complaints against Massachusetts were lost to view. At last in 1639
Gorges obtained his charter for a feudal propriety in Maine but no further
attempts were made to overthrow the Massachusetts Bay colony.
During the years from 1630 to 1640, the growth of the colony was
extraordinarily rapid. In the first year alone seventeen ships with two
thousand colonists came over, and it is estimated that by 1641 three
hundred vessels bearing twenty thousand passengers had crossed the
Atlantic. It was a great migration. Inevitably many went back, but the
great majority remained and settled in Boston and its neighborhood —
Roxbury, Charlestown, Dorchester, Cambridge, and Watertown, where in 1643
were situated according to Winthrop "near half of the commonwealth for
number of people and substance." From the first the colonists dispersed
rapidly, establishing in favorable places settlements which they generally
called plantations but sometimes towns. In these they lived as petty
religious and civil communities, each under its minister, with civil
officials chosen from among themselves. In the decade following 1630 the
number of such settlements rose to twenty-two. The inhabitants were almost
purely English in stock, with here and there an Irishman, a few Jews, and
an occasional negro from the West Indies. Nearly all the settlers were of
Puritan sympathies, and of middle-class origin — tenants from English
estates, artisans from English towns, and many indentured servants. A few
were of the aristocracy, such as Lady Arabella Johnson, daughter of the
Earl of Lincoln, Sir Richard Saltonstall, Lady Deborah Moody, members of
the Harlakenden family, young Henry Vane, Thomas Gorges, and a few others.
Of " Misters " and " Esquires " there was a goodly number, such as
Winthrop, Haynes, Emanuel Downing, and the like. The first leaders were
exceptional men, possessed of ability and education, and many were
university graduates, who brought with them the books and the habits of
the reader and scholar of their day. They were superior to those of the
second and third generation in the breadth of their ideas and in the vigor
and originality of their convictions.
Migration ceased in 1641, and a time of stress and suffering set in.
Commodities grew scarce, prices rose, many colonists returned to England
leaving debts behind, and as yet the colony produced no staples to
exchange for merchandise from the mother country. Some of the settlers,
discouraged, went to the West Indies; others, fleeing for fear of want,
found their way to the Dutch at Long Island. Pressure was brought to bear
at various times to persuade the people to migrate elsewhere as a body, to
Old Providence and Trinidad in the Caribbean, to Maryland, and later to
Jamaica; but these attempts proved vain. The Puritan was willing to endure
hardship and suffering for the sake of civil and religious independence,
but he was not willing to lose his identity among those who did not share
his faith in the guiding hand of God or who denied the principles
according to which he wished to govern his community. At first the leaders
of the migration were Nonconformists not Separatists. Francis Higginson,
Endecott's minister at Salem, had declared in 1629 that they did not go to
New England as separatists from the Church of England but only as those
who would "separate from the corruption in it"; and Winthrop used "Easter"
and the customary names of the months until 1635. But the Puritans became
essentially Separatists from the day when Dr. Samuel Fuller of Plymouth
persuaded the Salem community, even before the company itself had left
England, to accept the practices of the Plymouth Church. Each town
consequently had its church, pastor, teacher, and covenant, and became an
independent Congregational community — a circumstance which left a deep
impress upon the life and history of New England.
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