Volume I Part 8 (2/2)

In my own native country of Upper Canada, the Government for nearly half a century was considered despotic, and held up by American writers themselves as an unbearable tyranny. But one Church was alleged to be established in the country, and the government was that of a Church party; but never was the elective franchise there confined to the members of the one Church; never were men and women denied, or hailed before the legal tribunals and fined for exercising the privilege of Baptism, the Lord's Supper, or public wors.h.i.+p for themselves and families according to the dictates of their own consciences; never was the humblest inhabitant denied the right of pet.i.tion to the local Legislature on any subject, or against any governmental acts, or the right of appeal to the Imperial Government or Parliament on the subject of any alleged grievance. The very suspicion and allegation that the Canadian Government did counteract, by influences and secret representations, the statements of complaining parties to England, roused public indignation as arbitrary and unconst.i.tutional. Even the insurrection which took place in both Upper and Lower Canada in 1837 and 1838 was professedly against alleged partiality and injustice by the _local_ Government, as an obstruction to more liberal policy believed to be desired by the Imperial Government.

But here, in Ma.s.sachusetts, a colony chartered as a Company to distribute and settle public lands and carry on trade, in less than twenty years a.s.sumes the powers of a sovereign Commonwealth, denies to five-sixths of the population the freedom of citizens.h.i.+p, and limits it to the members of one Church, and denies Baptism, the Lord's Supper, and wors.h.i.+p to all who will not come to the one Church, punishes pet.i.tioners to itself for civil and religious freedom from those who were deprived of it, and punishes as ”treason” their appeal for redress to the English Parliament. Though, for the present, this unprecedented and unparalleled local despotism was sustained by the ingenious representations of Mr.

Winslow and the power of Cromwell; yet in the course of four years the surrender of its Charter was ordered by the regicide councillors of the Commonwealth, as it had been ordered by the beheaded King Charles and his Privy Council thirteen years before. In the meantime tragical events in England diverted attention from the colonies. The King was made prisoner, then put to death; the Monarchy was abolished, as well as the House of Lords; and the Long Parliament became indeed Cromwell's ”pocket” instrument.

It was manifest that the government of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay as a colony was impossible, with the pretensions which it had set up, declaring all appeals to England to be ”treason,” and punis.h.i.+ng complainants as ”conspirators” and ”traitors.” The appointment by Parliament in 1643 of a Governor-General and Commissioners had produced no effect in Ma.s.sachusetts Bay Colony; pretensions to supremacy and persecution were as rife as ever there. Dr. Child and his friends were punished for even asking for the administration that appointed the Governor-General and those Commissioners; and whether the Government of England were a monarchy or republic, it was clear that the pretensions to independence of the Puritans of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay must be checked, and their local tyranny restrained. For this purpose the Long Parliament adopted the same policy in 1650 that King Charles had done in 1637; demanded the surrender of the Charter; for that Parliament sent a summons to the local Government ordering it to transmit the Charter to England, to receive a new patent from the Parliament in all its acts and processes.

This order of Parliament to Ma.s.sachusetts Bay Colony to surrender its Charter was accompanied by a proclamation prohibiting trade with Virginia, Barbadoes, Bermuda, and Antigua, because these colonies continued to recognize royal authority, and to administer their laws in the name of the King. This duplicate order from the Long Parliament was a double blow to the colony of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay, and produced general consternation; but the dexterity and diplomacy of the colony were equal to the occasion. It showed its devotion to the cause of the Long Parliament by pa.s.sing an Act prohibiting trade with the loyal, but by them termed rebel colonies;[88] and it avoided surrendering the Charter by repeating its policy of delay and pet.i.tion, which it had adopted on a similar occasion in 1638 to King Charles; and its professions of loyalty to Charles, and prayers for the Royal Family, and the success of the Privy Council, it now repeated for the Long Parliament and its leaders, supporting its pet.i.tion by an appeal to its ten years' services of prayers and of men to the cause of the Long Parliament against the King. I will, in the first place, give in a note Mr. Bancroft's own account of what was claimed and ordered by the Long Parliament, and the pretensions and proceedings of the Legislature of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay, and then will give the princ.i.p.al parts of their pet.i.tion to the Long Parliament in their own words. The words and statements of Mr. Bancroft involve several things worthy of notice and remembrance: 1. The Congregational Church rulers of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay denied being British subjects, admitting no other allegiance to England than the Hanse Towns of Northern Germany to the Empire of Austria, or the Normandy ducal kings of England to the King of France; or, as Mr. Palfrey says, ”the relations which Burgundy and Flanders hold to France.” 2. Mr. Bancroft calls the pet.i.tioners ”disturbers of the public security,” and Mr.

Palfrey calls them ”conspirators”--terms applied to the Armenian remonstrants against the persecuting edicts of the Synod of Dort--terms applied to all the complainants of the exclusive and persecuting policy of the Tudor and Stuart kings of England--terms applied to even the first Christians--terms now applied to pleaders of religious and civil freedom by the advocates of a Ma.s.sachusetts Government as intolerant and persecuting as ever existed in Europe. The pet.i.tion of these impugned parties shows that all they asked for was equal religious and civil liberty and protection with their Congregational oppressors. Opprobrious names are not arguments; and imputations of motives and character are not facts, and are usually resorted to for want of them. 3. Mr. Bancroft designates as ”usurpations of Parliament” the proceedings of the Long Parliament in appointing a Governor-General and Commissioners for the colonies, and in exercising its right to receive and decide upon appeals from the colonies; and terms the support of the Parliament in the colony ”domestic treachery;” and the one member of the Legislature who had the courage to maintain the supremacy of the Mother Country is called the ”faithless deputy,” who was forthwith turned out of the House, which then proceeded, ”with closed doors,” to discuss in secret conclave its relations to England, and concluded by declaring ”against any a.s.sertion of paramount authority” on the part of the English Parliament. This was substantially a ”Declaration of Independence;” not, indeed, against an arbitrary king, as was alleged sixteen years before, and a hundred and thirty years afterwards, but against a Parliament which had dethroned and beheaded their King, and abolished the House of Lords and the Episcopal Church! All this Mr. Bancroft now treats as maintaining the _Charter_, of which he himself had declared, in another place, as I have quoted above: ”The Charter on which the freemen of Ma.s.sachusetts succeeded in erecting a system of independent representative liberty did not secure to them a single privilege of self-government, but left them as the Virginians had been left, without any valuable franchise, at the mercy of the Corporation within the realm.” Who then were the ”usurpers,” and had been for twenty years, of power which had not been conferred on them--the new Church and the persecuting Government of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay, or the supreme authority of England, both under a King and under a professed republican commonwealth? 4. Mr. Bancroft says: ”Had the Long Parliament succeeded in revoking the patent of the Ma.s.sachusetts Bay,[90] the tenor of American history would have been changed.” I agree with him in this opinion, though probably not in his application of it. I believe that the ”tenor of American history” would have led to as perfect an independence of the American States as they now enjoy--as free, but a better system of government, and without their ever having made war and bloodshed against Great Britain.

The facts thus referred to show that there were _Empire Loyalists_ in America in the seventeenth, as there were afterwards in the eighteenth century; they then embraced all the colonies of New England, except the ruling party of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay; they were all advocates of an equal franchise, and equal religious and civil liberty for all cla.s.ses--the very reverse of the Ma.s.sachusetts Government, which, while it denied any subordination to England, denied religious and civil liberty to all cla.s.ses except members of the Congregational Churches.

It is a curious and significant fact, stated by Mr. Bancroft, that these intolerant and persecuting proceedings of the Ma.s.sachusetts Bay Legislature were submitted to the Congregational ministers for their approval and final endors.e.m.e.nt. The Long Parliament in England checked and ruled the a.s.sembly of Westminster divines; but in Ma.s.sachusetts the divines, after a day's consideration, ”approved the proceedings of the General Court.” No wonder that such divines, supported by taxes levied by the State and rulers of the State, denounced all toleration of dissent from their Church and authority.

Before leaving this subject, I must notice the remarks of Mr.

Palfrey,--the second, if not first in authority of the historians of New England.

Mr. Palfrey ascribes what he calls ”the Presbyterian Cabal” to Mr.

William Va.s.sal, who was one of the founders and first Council of the colony of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay, whose brother Samuel had shared with Hampden the honour of having refused to pay s.h.i.+p-money to Charles, and who was now, with the Earl of Warwick,[91] one of the Parliamentary Commissioners for the colonies. It appears that Mr. Va.s.sal opposed from the beginning the new system of Church and proscriptive civil government set up at Ma.s.sachusetts Bay, and therefore came under Mr. Bancroft's category of ”disturbers of the public security,” and Mr. Palfrey's designation of ”conspirators;” but was in reality a liberal and a loyalist, not to King Charles indeed, but to the Commonwealth of England. I give Mr. Palfrey's statements, in his own words, in a note.[92]

The spirit and sentiments of Mr. Palfrey are identical with those which I have quoted of Mr. Bancroft; but while Mr. Bancroft speaks contemptuously of the authors of the pet.i.tion for equal civil and religious rights, Mr. Palfrey traces the movement to Mr. William Va.s.sal, one of the founders and first Council of the Ma.s.sachusetts Colony, and progenitor of the famous Whig family of Holland House. Nor does Mr.

Palfrey venture to question the doctrine or one of the statements of the pet.i.tioners, though he calls them ”conspirators.”

Mr. Palfrey--very unfairly, I think--imputes to the pet.i.tioners a design to subvert the Congregational wors.h.i.+p and establish the Presbyterian wors.h.i.+p in its place; and to give force to his imputations says that a numerous party in the English Parliament ”were bent on setting up Presbytery as the established religion in England and _its dependencies_.” There is not the slightest ground for a.s.serting that any party in the Long Parliament, any more than in Ma.s.sachusetts, designed the setting up of Presbytery as _the_ established wors.h.i.+p in the ”_dependencies_ of England.” King Charles the First, on his first sitting in judgment on complaints against the proceedings of the Ma.s.sachusetts Bay Council, declared to his Privy Council, in 1632, that he had never intended to impose the Church ceremonies, objected to by the Puritan clergy of the time, upon the colonists of Ma.s.sachusetts.

Charles the Second, thirty years afterwards, declared the same, and acted upon it during the quarter of a century of his reign. The Long Parliament acted upon the same principle. There is not an instance, during the whole sixty years of the first Ma.s.sachusetts Charter, of any attempt, on the part of either King or Commonwealth, to suppress or interfere with the Congregational wors.h.i.+p in New England; all that was asked by the King, or any party in Ma.s.sachusetts, was _toleration_ of other forms of Protestant wors.h.i.+p as well as that of the Congregational.

The very pet.i.tion, whose promoters are represented as movers of sedition, asked for no exclusive establishment of Presbyterianism, but for the toleration of both the Episcopal and Presbyterian wors.h.i.+p, and the wors.h.i.+p of other Protestant Churches existing in England; and their pet.i.tion was addressed to a Legislature of Congregationalists, elected by Congregationalists alone; and it was only in the event of their reasonable requests not being granted by the local Legislature that they proposed to present their grievances to the Imperial Parliament. The plea of fear for the safety of Congregational wors.h.i.+p in Ma.s.sachusetts was a mere pretence to justify the proscription and persecution of all dissent from the Congregational establishment. The spirit of the local Government and of the clergy that controlled it was _intolerance_.

Toleration was denounced by them as the doctrine of devils; and the dying lines of Governor Dudley are reported to have been--

”Let men of G.o.d, in Court and Church, watch O'er such as do a toleration hatch.”[94]

There is one other of Mr. Palfrey's statements which is of special importance; it is the admission that a majority of the population of Ma.s.sachusetts were excluded from all share in the Government, and were actually opposed to it. Referring to the pet.i.tion to the local Legislature, he says: ”The demand was enforced by considerations which were not without plausibility, and were presented in a seductive form.

It was itself an appeal to the _discontent of the numerical majority not invested with a share in the government_.”[95]

It is thus admitted, and clear from indubitable facts, that professing to be republicans, they denied to the great majority of the people any share in the government. Professing hatred of the persecuting intolerance of King Charles and Laud in denying liberty of wors.h.i.+p to all who differed from them, they now deny liberty of wors.h.i.+p to all who differ from themselves, and punish those by fine and imprisonment who even pet.i.tion for equal religious and civil liberty to all cla.s.ses of citizens. They justify even armed resistance against the King, and actually decapitating as well as dethroning him, in order to obtain, professedly, a government by the majority of the nation and liberty of wors.h.i.+p; and they now deny the same principle and right of civil and religious liberty to the great majority of the people over whom they claimed rule. They claim the right of resisting Parliament itself by armed force if they had the power, and only desist from a.s.serting it, to the last, as the _salus populi_ did not require it, and for the sake of their ”G.o.dly friends in England,” and to not afford a pretext for the ”rebellious course” of their fellow-colonists in Virginia and the West Indies, who claimed the same independence of Parliament that the Government of Ma.s.sachusetts claimed, but upon the ground which was abhorrent to the Congregational Puritans of Ma.s.sachusetts--namely, that of loyalty to the king.

I will now give in a note, in their own words, the princ.i.p.al parts of their pet.i.tion, ent.i.tled ”General Court of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay, New England, in a Pet.i.tion to Parliament in 1651,”[97] together with extracts of two addresses to Cromwell, the one enclosing a copy of their pet.i.tion to Parliament, when he was Commander-in-Chief of the army, and the other in 1654, after he had dismissed the Rump Parliament, and become absolute--denying to the whole people of England the elective franchise, as his admiring friends in Ma.s.sachusetts denied it to the great majority of the people within their jurisdiction. Chalmers says they ”outfawned and outwitted Cromwell.” They gained his support by their first address, and thanked him for it in their second. Having ”the Parliament in his pocket” until he threw even the rump of it aside altogether, Cromwell caused Parliament to desist from executing its own order.

It will be seen in the following chapter, that ten years after these laudatory addresses to Parliament and Cromwell, the same General Court of Ma.s.sachusetts addressed Charles the Second in words truly loyal and equally laudatory, and implored the continuance of their Charter upon the ground, among other reasons, that they had never identified themselves with the Parliament against his Royal father, but had been ”pa.s.sive” during the whole of that contest. Their act against having any commerce with the colonies who adhered to the King indicated their neutrality; and the reader, by reading their addresses to the Parliament and Cromwell, will see whether they did not thoroughly identify themselves with the Parliament and Cromwell against Charles the First.

They praise Cromwell as raised up by the special hand of G.o.d, and crave upon him the success of ”the Captain of the Lord's hosts;” and they claim the favourable consideration of Parliament to their request upon the ground that they had identified themselves with its fortunes to rise or fall with it; that they had aided it by their prayers and fastings, and by men who had rendered it valuable service. The reader will be able to judge of the agreement in their _professions_ and _statements_ in their addresses to Parliament and Cromwell and to King Charles the Second ten years afterwards. In their addresses to Parliament and Cromwell they professed their readiness to _fall_ as well as rise with the cause of the Parliament; but when that _fell_, they repudiated all connection with it.

In the year 1651, and during the very Session of Parliament to which the General Court addressed its pet.i.tion and narrated its sacrifices and doings in the cause of the Parliament, the latter pa.s.sed the famous Navigation Act, which was re-enacted and improved ten years afterwards, under Charles the Second, and which became the primary pretext of the American Revolution. The Commonwealth was at this time at war with the Dutch republic, which had almost destroyed and absorbed the s.h.i.+pping trade of England. Admiral Blake was just commencing that series of naval victories which have immortalized his name, and placed England from that time to this at the head of the naval powers of the world. Sir Henry Vane, as the Minister of the Navy, devised and carried through Parliament the famous Navigation Act--an Act which the colony of Ma.s.sachusetts, by the connivance of Cromwell (who now identified himself with that colony), regularly evaded, at the expense of the American colonies and the English revenue.[98] Mr. Palfrey says:

”The people of Ma.s.sachusetts might well be satisfied with their condition and prospects. Everything was prospering with them. They had established comfortable homes, which they felt strong enough to defend against any power but the power of the Mother Country; and that was friendly. They had always the good-will of Cromwell. In relation _to them_, he allowed the Navigation Law, _which pressed on the Southern colonies, to became_ A DEAD LETTER, and they received the commodities of all nations free of duty, and sent their s.h.i.+ps to all the ports of continental Europe.”[99]

But that in which the ruling spirits of the Ma.s.sachusetts General Court--apart from their ceaseless endeavours to monopolise trade and extend territory--seemed to revel most was in searching out and punis.h.i.+ng _dissent_ from the Congregational Establishment, and, at times, with the individual liberty of citizens in sumptuary matters. No Laud ever equalled them in this, or excelled them in enforcing uniformity, not only of doctrine, but of opinions and practice in the minutest particulars. When a stand against England was to be taken, in wors.h.i.+p, or inquisition into matters of religions dissent, and woman's apparel, Endicot became Governor (according to the ”advice of the Elders” in such matters), and Winthrop was induced to be Deputy Governor, although the latter was hardly second to the former in the spirit and acts of religious persecution. He had been a wealthy man in England, and was well educated and amiable; but after his arrival at Ma.s.sachusetts Bay he seems to have wanted firmness to resist the intolerant spirit and narrow views of Endicot. He died in 1649. Mr.

Palfrey remarks: ”Whether it was owing to solicitude as to the course of affairs in England after the downfall of the Royal power, or to the absence of the moderating influence of Winthrop, or to sentiments engendered, on the one hand by the alarm from the Presbyterians in 1646, and on the other by the confidence inspired by the [Congregational]

<script>