Volume I Part 14 (1/2)
After the Court had adopted its answer of refusal to the King's signification, Mr. Bradstreet said: ”I fear we take not a right course for our safety. It is clear that this signification is from his Majesty.
I do desire to have it remembered that I do dissent, and desire to have it recorded that I dissent, from that part of it as is an answer to the King's signification.” Major Dennison declared his dissent from the letter to Mr. Morrice, as not being proportionate to the end desired, and he hoped, intended, and desired it might be entered--namely, due satisfaction to his Majesty, and the preservation of the peace and liberty of the colony.[153]
It is clear from the foregoing facts that the alleged invasion of chartered rights and privileges put forth by the ruling party of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay was a mere pretext to cover the long-cherished pretensions (called by them ”dear-bought rights”) to absolute independence; that is, the domination of the Congregationalist Government, to the exclusion of the Crown, to proscribe from the elective franchise and eligibility to office all but Congregationalists, and to persecute all who differed from them in either religious or political opinion, including their control and suppression of the freedom of the press.[154] They persisted in the cruel persecution of their Baptist brethren as well as of the Quakers, notwithstanding the King had established the fullest religious liberty by Royal Charter, granted in 1663 to the Colonies of Connecticut and Rhode Island, and had by his letters in 1662 and 1664, and subsequently, forbidden religious persecution and prescribed religious toleration as a condition of the continuance of the Charter in Ma.s.sachusetts Bay Colony.[155]
I will give in a note, from the records of their own Court, their persecuting proceedings against certain Baptists in April, 1666, six years after the Restoration.[156]
The Puritan historian, Neal, writing under date three years later, 1669, says: ”The displeasure of the Government ran very high against the Anabaptists and Quakers at this time. The Anabaptists had gathered one Church at Swanzey, and another at Boston, but the General Court was very severe in putting the laws in execution against them, whereby many honest people were ruined by fines, imprisonment, and banishment, which was the more extraordinary because their brethren in England were groaning under persecution from the Church of England at the same time.
Sad complaints were sent over to England every summer of the severity of the Government against the Anabaptists, which obliged the dissenting ministers in London to appear at length in their favour. A letter was accordingly sent over to the Governor of Ma.s.sachusetts, signed by Dr.
Goodwin, Dr. Owen, Mr. Nie, Mr. Caryl, and nine other ministers, beseeching him to make use of his authority and interest for restoring such to their liberty as were in prison on account of religion, and that their sanguinary laws might not be put in execution in future.” [Mr.
Neal gives the letter, and then proceeds.] ”But the excellent letter made no impression upon them; the prisoners were not released, nor the execution of the laws suspended; nay, so far from this, that ten years after, in the year 1679, a General Synod being called to inquire into the evils that provoked the Lord to bring his judgments on New England, they mention these among the rest, 'Men have set up their thresholds by G.o.d's threshold, and their posts by G.o.d's post; Quakers are false wors.h.i.+ppers, and such Anabaptists as have risen up among us, in opposition to the Churches of the Lord Jesus,' etc., etc.”
”Wherefore it must needs be provoking to G.o.d if these things be not duly and fully testified against by every one in their several capacities respectively.”[158]
The present of two large masts and a s.h.i.+p-load of timber; successive obsequious and evasive addresses; explanations of agents; compliance in some particulars with the Royal requirements in regard to the oath of allegiance, and administering the law, so far appeased the King's Government that further action was suspended for a time in regard to enforcing the granting of the elective franchise, eligibility to office, and liberty of wors.h.i.+p to other than Congregationalists,[159] especially as the attention of Charles was absorbed by exciting questions at home, by his war with Holland, which he bitterly hated, and his intrigues with France, on which he became a paid dependant. But the complaints and appeals to the King from neighbouring colonies of the invasion of individual and territorial rights by the Court of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay, and from the persecuted and proscribed inhabitants of their own colony, awakened at last the renewed attention of the King's Government to the proceedings of the Ma.s.sachusetts Bay rulers. The letter which the King was advised to address to them is kind and conciliatory in its tone; but it shows that while the King, as he had declared in his first letter, addressed to them seventeen years before, recognized the ”Congregational way of wors.h.i.+p,” he insisted on toleration of the wors.h.i.+p of Episcopalians, Baptists, etc., and the civil rights and privileges of their members,[161] denied by these ”fathers of American liberty” to the very last; until then, power of proscription and persecution was wrested from them by the cancelling of their Charter.
The chief requirements of this letter were, as stated by Mr. Hutchinson:
”1. That agents be sent over in six months, fully instructed to answer and transact what was undetermined at that time.
”2. That freedom and liberty of conscience be given to such persons as desire to serve G.o.d in the way of the Church of England, so as not to be thereby made obnoxious, or discountenanced from their sharing in the government, much less that they, or any other of his Majesty's subjects (not being Papists) who do not agree in the Congregational way, be by law subject to fines or forfeitures or other incapacities.
”3. That no other distinction be observed in making freemen than that they be men of competent estates, rateable at ten s.h.i.+llings, according to the rules of the place, and that such in their turns be capable of the magistracy, and all laws made void that obstruct the same.
”4. That the ancient number of eighteen a.s.sistants be observed, as by Charter. (They had been limited to eight or ten.)
”5. That all persons coming to any privilege, trust or office, take the oath of allegiance.
”6. That all military commissions as well as proceedings of justice run in his Majesty's name.
”7. That all laws repugnant to, and inconsistent with, the laws of England for trade, be abolished.”[164]
There were certain injunctions in regard to complaints from neighbouring colonies; but the necessity for such injunctions as those above enumerated, and stated more at large in the King's letter, as stated in note on p. 187, given for the third or fourth time the nineteenth year after the Restoration, shows the disloyal proscriptions and persecuting character of the Government of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay, and the great forbearance of the King's Government in continuing the Charter while the conditions of its proposed continuance were constantly violated.
Dr. Palfrey speaks of these requirements, and the whole policy of the King's Government, as ”usurpations” on the chartered rights of the Ma.s.sachusetts Bay Colony. But let any reader say in which of the above seven requirements there is the slightest ”usurpation” on any right of a British subject; whether there is anything that any loyal British subject would not freely acknowledge and respond to; requirements unhesitatingly obeyed by all the colonies except that of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay alone, and which have been observed by every British Province of America for the last hundred years, and are observed by the Dominion of Canada at this day.
Dr. Palfrey, referring to this period (1676-82), says: ”Lord Clarendon's scheme of colonial policy was now ripe,” but he does not adduce a word from Lord Clarendon to show what that policy was only by insinuations and a.s.sertions, and a.s.sumes it to have been the subversion of the rights and liberties of the Ma.s.sachusetts Bay Colony. Lord Clarendon, in his letter to the Governor Endicot, given above, pp. 160, 161, explains his colonial policy, which was not only to maintain the Charter in its integrity, but to see that its provisions and objects were not violated but fulfilled, and that while the Congregational wors.h.i.+p should not be interfered with, the Congregational Government should not proscribe from the elective franchise and liberty of wors.h.i.+p the members of other Protestant denominations. The Hon. Robert Boyle, the philosopher and benefactor of New England, and President of the New England Society for Propagation of the Gospel among the Indians, expressed the same views with Lord Clarendon, and there is not a shadow of proof that Lord Clarendon ever entertained any other policy in regard to New England than that which he expressed in his letter to Governor Endicot in 1664.
Dr. Palfrey and other New England historians occupy four-fifths of their pages with accounts of the continental proceedings of the Governments of the Stuarts, and their oppressions and persecutions of Nonconformists in England, and then _a.s.sume_ that their policy was the same in regard to the New England Colonies, and that the Ma.s.sachusetts Bay Colony was therefore the champion defender of colonial liberties, in denying responsibility to the Imperial Government for its acts, and refusing the usual oaths, and acts of allegiance to the Throne; whereas their _a.s.sumptions_ (for they are nothing else) are unsupported by a single fact, and are contradicted, without exception, by the declarations and acts of the Government of Charles the Second, as well as by those of his royal father. Language can hardly exaggerate or reprobate in too strong terms the cruel persecutions of dissenters from the Established Episcopal Church in England, by both Charles the First and Charles the Second; but the Congregational Government of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay exceeded that of the Charleses in proscribing and persecuting dissenters from their Established Congregational Churches in that colony; and as well might Messrs. Palfrey, Bancroft, and other New England historians maintain that, because Congregationalists contended for liberty of wors.h.i.+p for themselves in England, they practised it in regard to those who did not agree with them in wors.h.i.+p in Ma.s.sachusetts Bay. The proscription and persecution of Congregationalists and Baptists by Episcopalian rulers in England were outrivalled by the Congregational rulers in their proscriptions and persecutions of Episcopalians and Baptists in Ma.s.sachusetts.
It is also a.s.sumed by the New England historians referred to that the King's advisers had intimated the intention of appointing a Governor-General over the Colonies of New England to see to the observance of their Charters and of the Navigation Laws; but wherein did this infringe the rights or privileges of any Colonial Charter? Wherein did it involve any more than rightful attention to Imperial authority and interests? Wherein has the appointment or office of a Governor-General of British North America, in addition to the Lieutenant-Governor of each province, ever been regarded to this day as an infringement of the rights and privileges of any Legislature or British subject in the colonies? Wherein has the right of appeal by any colony or party to the Supreme Courts or authorities of England, against the decisions of local Courts or local executive acts, been regarded as an infringement of colonial rights, or other than a protection to colonial subjects? When has the right of appeal by parties in any of the neighbouring States, to the Supreme Court at Was.h.i.+ngton, been held to be an invasion of the rights of such States?
The rulers of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay Colony concealed and secreted their Charter; they then represented it as containing provisions which no Royal Charter in the world ever contained; they represented the King as having abdicated, and excluded himself from all authority over them as a colony or as individuals; they denied that Parliament itself had any authority to legislate for any country on the western side of the Atlantic; they virtually claimed absolute independence, erasing the oath of allegiance from their records, proscribing and persecuting all nonconformists to the Congregational wors.h.i.+p, invading the territories of other colonies and then maintaining their invasions by military force, denying the authority of Great Britain or of any power on earth to restrict or interfere with their acts. The New England historians referred to are compelled to confess that the Royal Charter contained no such provisions or powers as the rulers of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay pretended; yet their narratives and argumentations and imputations upon the British Government a.s.sume the truth of the fabulous representations of the Charter, and treat not only every act of the King as royal tyranny, but every suspicion of what the King might do as a reality, and the hostility of the Ma.s.sachusetts Bay Government as a defence of const.i.tutional rights and resistance of royal despotism. But in these laboured and eloquent philippics against the Government of the Restoration, they seem to forget that the Parliament and Government of the Commonwealth and Cromwell a.s.serted far larger powers over the colonies than did the Government and Parliament of Charles the Second (as is seen by their Act and appointments in their enactments quoted above, pp. 88-90).
The Commonwealth appointed a Governor-General (the Earl of Warwick), Commissioners with powers to remove and appoint Colonial Governors and other local officers; whereas the Commissioners appointed by Charles the Second had no authority to remove or appoint a single local Governor or other officer, to annul or enact a single law, but to inquire and report; and even as a Court of Appeal their proceedings and decisions were to be reported for final action in England.
The famous Act of Navigation itself, which ultimately became the chief ground of the American revolutionary war, was pa.s.sed by the Commonwealth, though, by a collusion between Cromwell and the rulers of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay, its provisions were evaded in that colony, while rigorously enforced in the other colonies.[165]
In the first year of Charles the Second this Act was renewed, with some additional provisions.[166]
But to return to the correspondence between the King's Government and the rulers of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay. It may be supposed that after the King had promised, in 1662, to forget past offences and continue the justly forfeited Royal Charter upon certain conditions, and that those conditions were evaded by various devices during nearly twenty years, the Royal patience would become exhausted, and that, instead of the gentle instructions and remonstrances which had characterized his former letters, the King would adopt more severe and imperative language. Hence in his next letter, September 30, 1680, to the Governor and Council of the Ma.s.sachusetts, he commences in the following words: