perfect riot under these circumstances. Women without any clothing, and smeared with black dye, marched through highways and public places "by way of prophesying," screeching, denouncing awful judgments, causing dread, pain, and fright to many of the delicate of their own sex. Such was the position of things here in May, 1661. There were to be no more capital cases. About thirty victims had suffered whippings by order of the General Court, and many more from local courts. With the exception of the lamentable final penalty, Massachusetts had exactly followed - even that at a distance -the course of the mother country in the treatment of the Quakers, who were fined, plundered, mobbed, scourged, tormented, and left to die and rot by hundreds in loathsome prisons. The maniac Quaker, James Naylor, was barbarously mutilated.

2. We ask now, in the second place, what was the message sent to our authorities by King Charles, and how did they deal with it? It was not till six months after Massachusetts had set aside her own law, and eight months after the gallows had had its last victim, and some others subject to it had been saved from it, that the occasion occurred which is so picturesquely and ideally drawn by Whittier. A very famous and earnest Quaker, Edward Burroughs, was the medium of the king's intervention, such as it was. Burroughs managed to obtain an interview with Charles II., for the purpose of interceding for his ill-treated Quaker brethren at home there. There is a story that Burroughs got access to the king out of doors, while his Majesty was playing tennis. As Burroughs kept on his hat while accosting the king, the latter gracefully removed his plumed cap and bowed. The Quaker, put to the blush, said: "Thee need'st not remove thy hat." "Oh," replied the king, "it is of no consequence, only that when the king and another gentleman are talking together, it is usual for one of them to take off his hat." Even the stern Oliver Cromwell allowed himself the same play of humor in an interview with George Fox, as we learn from the latter's journal. One cannot but wish that there had been more of this rollicking pleasantry in dealing with the fantasies of those strange and eccentric enthusiasts here, instead of such cruel handling of them. At Burroughs's solicitation the king procured a letter to be written by his secretary to the authorities in Massachusetts, bearing date Sept. 9, 1661. This letter was put for transmis sion here into the hands of Samuel Shattuck, a Salem Quaker, who had been banished. The Quakers procured a vessel

commanded by one of them to bring it. On arriving here, the captain and Shattuck waited on Governor Endicott at his house with the royal letter. The governor is said to have replied: "We shall obey the king's command." they did not. They in no whit changed the course they were then pursuing, but simply reinforced their measures. What was the king's command? It was in these words: "That if there were any of those people called Quakers amongst them, now already condemned to suffer death or other corporal punishment, or that were imprisoned, and obnoxious to the like condemnation, they were to forbear to proceed any further therein," and should transfer them to England for trial. Not a single condemned person was sent off according to this order. The magistrates may have thought that the king had more such subjects then on his own hands than he could dispose of. Glad as they would have been to be rid of the Quakers, this was not their way of relief. Nor was a single Quaker prisoner discharged, much less was there a general jail delivery. The court, meeting on November 27, with its usual adroitness and temporizing in dealing with foreign intermeddlings with its affairs, acknowledged the receipt of the royal letter, and, "that they might not in the least offend his Majesty," ordered and declared "that the execution of the laws in force against Quakers, as such, so far as they respected corporal punishment or death, should be suspended until the court took further order." This "further order" was taken by the court, Oct. 8, 1662, putting the existing and suspended law in full force, but restricting the whipping at the cart's tail to three successive towns in ridding themselves of a Quaker. Meanwhile the court, by messengers sent to England, represented to the king how they had been persecuted and tormented by the Quakers. This drew from the king a second letter, in which he wrote, under date of June, 1662: "We cannot be understood to direct, or wish, that any indulgence should be granted to those persons commonly called Quakers, whose principles being inconsistent with any kind of government, we have found it necessary, by the advice of Parliament here, to make a sharp law against them, and are well contented that you do the like there." So that the reinforcement of the existing laws by the court, in its order of October, after the receipt of this letter, had the king's sanction.

3. The king refers to the "sharp law" which he and his Parliament had felt compelled to pass against the same troublers. This brings us to the third question, How did he

and the laws of his kingdom treat the Quakers? Besides all the outrages inflicted upon them already referred to, Parliament, May 2, 1662, passed this law: "All Quakers or other persons refusing to take an oath required by law, or persuading to such refusal, or maintaining by speech or print the unlawfulness of oaths, and in particular all Quakers meeting for worship to the number of five or more, to be fined five pounds for the first offence, and ten pounds for the second; or failing to pay such fines, to be imprisoned with hard labor for three months for the first offence, and six months for the second. Offenders on a third conviction to be banished to the plantations." Masson (Life of Milton, vol. vi. p. 259) says that under this law "cargoes of Quakers and others had been exported to the black ends of the earth." The king could hardly desire that the plantations should send them back to him again.

From these facts and dates it appears that the Quakers here were not at all indebted to royal interference in their behalf for relief, nor for any change in the mode of treatment of them other than had been in progress by the working of public sentiment in the colony. The magistrates of Massachusetts, in following their consciences and the guidance of their own best judgment, unwise as that seems to us, as to their own protection and interests, were not in the habit of succumbing to any foreign interference or dictation in their affairs. I can recall no single instance in which, while they kept their charter, they yielded to advice even, much less to authority, from abroad. While the temper of some of the magistrates was aggravated by the insolence and indecorums of the Quakers, their dogged pluck and patience, their elation of spirit and unresisting submission, wrought their due effect upon the majority of the people. Thus even an austere Puritan community yielded to the softening sway of gentle patience under suffering. As resentment, violence, and cruelty on the part of the authorities gradually relaxed in bitterness, the Quakers gave over their antics and extravagances, and in time, under the pleadings of such as the wise and good Barclay, became known as the most inoffensive, exemplary, and respected of all religious fellowships. On this matter we might prefer the fiction to the fact, the poetry to the prose. But the prose is history.

*

*See below, p. 387.-Eds.

The Rev. R. S. STORRS, D.D., of Brooklyn, New York, a Corresponding Member, and the President of the Long Island Historical Society, then spoke briefly in acknowledgment of a welcome extended to him by the President, dwelling on the fact that such societies as these exist not only to build our American Walhallas, temples of silence and reconciliation, but have a specially important function, because no other history brings barbarism and civilization side by side as does ours, none other so clearly shows the development from small beginnings to vast results, and the working of the Divine plan in the progress of the race. He spoke also of the Long Island Society, which has inherited some of the impulses of this Society and of this Commonwealth, transplanted into another soil.

Dr. OLIVER presented to the Library, in behalf of the owner, a volume of rare interest, being the family Bible of the Rev. Increase Mather, and said :

I received not very long ago, Mr. President, from a lady, now resident in New Jersey, a volume of not a little historic interest, with the request that at some time it should be presented to this Society. This volume, now upon the table, has a twofold value. It is a tolerably well-preserved copy of one of the later editions of the Geneva Bible, known sometimes by the not altogether reverent title of the "Breeches Bible," printed in 1599; but what gives it a special local interest is the fact that it was once the family Bible of Dr. Increase Mather, and contains a record in his own hand of his marriage and of the births and baptisms of his children; at the head of which stands the name of his distinguished son, the author of the "Magnalia," with the following memorandum :

"My son Cotton was born at Boston in N. E. ye 12 day of ye 12 moneth, a quarter of an hour past 10, before noon, being ye fifth day of ye weeke 1663. He was baptized at ye old church in Boston by Mr Wilson 15 day of yt same moneth."

It appears from an inscription on the titlepage that this Bible was given to Mrs. Mather by her father, John Cotton; and it may be inferred, from the date of its issue, that it was in his possession some time before he parted with it.

It was given by Dr. Mather subsequently (May 22, 1697, as is stated upon the fly-leaf) to his daughter Jerusha; who leaving no issue, it passed into the hands of his daughter Elizabeth, whose first husband was William Greenough, and

who afterward married Josias Byles. From Mr. Byles it descended to his son, the first Dr. Mather Byles, then to the second Dr. Mather Byles, afterward to his son Belcher, and at last to his daughter Sarah Louisa Byles, who now presents it to this Society.

There are various memoranda upon the fly-leaves and covers made by a later hand. The following, relating to the setting apart a tract of land for a farm for Mr. John Cotton by the inhabitants of Boston in 1635, is in the handwriting of Increase Mather:

14th 10m At a publick meeting of ye Inhabitants of Boston1635 It is agreed yt Mr W Coleburn Mr Wm Aspinwall, Mr Jno Sanford, W Balstone & Richard Wright, or four of them, shal lay out at Muddy River a sufficient allottment for a farm for our Teacher, Mr John Cotton.

1o 9th mo. 1636

At a meeting of ye

Select men of Boston

It was agreed yt our Teacher Mr John Cotton shal have unto his Lott at Muddy River all ye ground, lying between ye two Brooks, next to William Coleman's allottment there, and so to ye other end, unto ye shortest overcutt beyond ye Hill towards ye Norwest.

The thanks of the Society were voted to Miss Byles for her very valuable and acceptable gift.

Mr. ELLIS AMES communicated the following paper on the part taken by Massachusetts soldiers in the expedition against Carthagena under Admiral Vernon, embodying hitherto unpublished excerpts from the provincial records obtained in recent years from the Public Record Office in London, with much material that failed to be noted by the historian Hutchinson.

War was declared by Great Britain against Spain on the twenty-third day of October, 1739, and early in 1740 the British Government fitted out an expedition against the Spanish dominions in America, consisting of twenty-nine ships of the line, with nearly an equal number of frigates, fire-ships, and bomb-ketches, manned with fifteen thousand seamen and accompanied by twelve thousand land forces, all plentifully supplied with arms, ammunition, and provisions.

The English provinces in America were called upon to furnish reinforcements, and however it may have been with