The Royal Displeasure
In October, 1676, Massachusetts sent over two of its leading men, William
Stoughton, a magistrate, and Peter Bulkeley, speaker of the House of
Representatives, to ward off, if possible, the attack on the colony, but
with characteristic short-sightedness gave them no authority to discuss
officially anything but the Mason and Gorges claims. For more than two
years these men, representative rather of the moderate party than of the
"old faction" in the colony, remained in England, frequently appearing
before the Lords of Trade, where they were subjected to a searching
examination at the hands of a not very sympathetic body of men. The
meetings in the Council Chamber in Whitehall, where the committee sat,
were occasions full of interest and excitement. At one of them, on April
8, 1677, Stoughton, Bulkeley, Randolph, Mason, and
Sir Edmund Andros, Governor of New York for the Duke, were all
present, and the agents must have found the situation awkward and
embarrassing. The committee expressed its resentment at the colony's habit
of disobedience and evasion, and showed no inclination to adopt a moderate
policy, advocating, on the contrary, investigation "from the whole root."
The position of a Massachusetts agent in England during these trying years
was most undesirable, and so many difficulties and discouragements did
Stoughton and Bulkeley encounter that several times they asked for
permission to return home and once, at least, had to go to the country for
their health. But whatever were the troubles of an agent in England, they
were trifling as compared with those which confronted him at home when he
failed, as he almost invariably did fail, to obtain all that the colony
expected. Cotton Mather tells us that Norton died in 1663 of melancholy
and chagrin, and that for forty years there was not one agent but met
"with some very froward entertainment among his countrymen." No wonder it
was always difficult to find men who were willing to go.
JOSEPH DUDLEY
Painting in the collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Boston.
SIR EDMUND ANDROS
Engraving from the original painting owned by descendants of Andros
in London, England. Reproduced in The Andros Tracts, published by the
Prince Society, Boston.
At first the Lords of Trade favored the sending of a supplemental
charter and the extending of a pardon to the colony; but as the evidence
against Massachusetts accumulated, they began to consider the revision of
the laws, the appointment of a collector of customs and a royal governor,
and even the annulment of the charter itself. In short, they determined to
bring Massachusetts "under a more palpable declaration of obedience to his
Majesty." The general court of the colony, although it had said that "any
breach in the wall would endanger the whole," was at last frightened by
the news from England and passed an order in October, 1677, that the laws
of trade must be strictly observed, and later magistrates and deputies
alike took the oath of allegiance prescribed by the Crown, promising to
drop the word "Commonwealth" for the future. The members of the assembly
wrote an amazing letter, pietistic and cringing, in which they prostrated
themselves before the King, asked to be numbered among his "poore yet
humble and loyal subjects," and begged for a renewal of all their
privileges. At best such a letter could have done little in England to
increase respect for the colony, but any good results expected from it
were completely destroyed by the serious blunder which the colony made at
this time in purchasing from the Gorges claimants the title to the
province of Maine, which with New Hampshire had recently been declared by
the chief justices of the King's Bench and Common Pleas to lie outside of
the jurisdiction of Massachusetts. This attempt to obtain, without the
royal consent, a territory which the legal advisers of the Crown had
decided Massachusetts could not have, only strengthened the determination
of the authorities in England to bring the colony into the King's hand by
the appointment of a royal governor. For the moment, however, the uprising
of Bacon in Virginia and the Popish Plot in England so distracted the
Government that it was obliged to slight or to postpone much of its
business. It did succeed in settling the perplexing question of New
Hampshire, for, having obtained from Mason a renunciation of all his
claims to the Government, though leaving him with full title to the soil,
it organized that territory as a colony under the control of the Crown.
With these matters out of the way or less exigent, the Lords of
Trade returned to the affairs of New England. They wished, before
proceeding to extremes, to give Massachusetts another chance to be heard;
so, in dismissing the agents in the autumn of 1679, they instructed the
colony to send over within six months others fully prepared "to answer the
misdemeanors imputed against them." They also decided to send Randolph
back as collector and surveyor of customs, with letters to all the New
England colonies, ordering them to enforce the acts of trade, and another
to Massachusetts requiring that she provide a minister for those in Boston
who wished an Anglican church. Randolph, who left for New England for the
second time, in December, 1678, has the distinction of being the first
royal official appointed for any of the northern colonies. Almost his
first task was to settle the province of New Hampshire under royal
authority, with a government consisting of a president, a council, and an
assembly. Thus British control in New England was making progress, and the
worst fears of the "old faction" in Massachusetts were being realized.
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