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they had proceeded according to justice, and within the limit of the powers conferred on them by the charter. They urged the injurious results which would follow, in respect to the attempts making to convert the natives, if the Shawomet disturbers should be "countenanced and upheld." They set forth that the allowance of appeals to England would be "destructive to all government, both in the honor and also in the power of it." And they cautioned the Commissioners against assuming a responsibility to which they would find themselves unequal. Considering the vast distance between England and these parts,. ...... your counsels and judgments could neither be so well grounded, nor so seasonably applied, as might either be so useful for us or so safe for yourselves, in your discharge in the great day of account, for any miscarriage which might befall us while we depended upon your counsel and help, which could not seasonably be administered to us. Whereas, if any such should befall us when we have the government in our own hands, the State of England shall not answer for it." 1

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When Winslow arrived in England, he found that Gorton had lately made an appeal to the public through the press. He prepared a reply with such promptness, that

2

1 Winthrop, II. 295–298; R. I. also of the Kingdome of England, with Hist. Coll., II. 198–202.

* Gorton's book was probably published in the last quarter of 1646, as the imprimatur is dated August 3d in that year. Its full title is " Simplicitie's Defence against Seven-Headed Policy. Or, Innocency Vindicated, being unjustly accused and sorely censured by that Seven-Headed Church Government united in New England. Or, that Servant so Imperious in his Master's Absence, revived, and now thus reacting in New England. Or, the Combate of the United Colonies, not only against some of the Natives and Subjects, but against the Authority

their Execution of Laws, in the Name and Authority of the Servant (or of themselves), and not in the Name and Authority of the Lord, or Fountain of the Government. Wherein is declared an Act of a Great People and Country of the Indians in those Parts, both Princes and People (unanimously) in their voluntary Submission and Subjection unto the Protection and Government of Old England (from the Fame they hear thereof), together with the true Manner and Forme of it, as it appears under their own Hands and Seals; being stirred up and provoked thereto by the Combate and Courses

Success of

it appeared in a few weeks. In a Dedication to the Commissioners he made five requests; 1. that Winslow's they would "strengthen the censure of the Massachusetts by their favorable approbation," so that "the country might be the more preserved from their fears of the Gortonians' desperate close with so

agency.

above said. Throughout which Treatise is secretly intermingled that great Opposition, which is in the Goings forth of those two grand Spirits, that are, and ever have been, extant in the World (through the Sons of Men), from the Beginning and Foundation thereof." In this language the reader will readily discern two points of Gorton's policy. He piqued the pride of Englishmen by representing the United Colonies as resisting "the authority of the kingdom of England;" and he played upon the passions of his Levelling friends by complaining that the colonial rulers were acting "not in the name and authority of the Lord," and that they were embodying "that great opposition, which is in the goings forth," &c. A second edition appeared in the following year, when the party of resistance to ecclesiastical coercion had grown stronger; and the titlepage, with an improved adaptation to the time, represents the work to be "A true Complaint of a Peaceable People, being Part of the English in New England, made unto the State of Old England, against cruell Persecutors, united in Church Government in those Parts. Wherein is made manifest the manifold Outrages, Cruelties, Oppressions, and Taxations, by cruell and close Imprisonments, Fire and Sword, Deprivation of Goods, Lands, and Livelyhood; and such like barbarous Inhumanities, exercised upon the People of Providence Plantations in the Nanhyganset Bay, by those of the Massachusetts, with the Rest of the United Colonies, stretching themselves

beyond the Bounds of all their own Jurisdictions, perpetrated and acted in such an unreasonable and barbarous Manner, as many thereby have lost their Lives. As it hath been faithfully declared to the Honorable Committee of Lords and Commons for Forrain Plantations; whereupon they gave present Order for Redress. The sight and Consideration whereof hath moved a great Country of the Indians and Natives in those Parts, Princes and People, to submit unto the Crown of England, and earnestly to sue to the State thereof, for Safeguard and Shelter from like Cruelties."

In this book, on the one hand, the taste of the Ranting mystics is largely consulted (e. g. pp. 95–111); on the other, skilful appeals are made to the national pride, by representations that the authority of Parliament and its Commissioners was defied by the Massachusetts people, and respected by their victims (pp. 89-91, 94). Of the estimation in which the book and its writer were held by the English Presbyterians, we get a glimpse from Samuel Rutherfurd's "Survey of the Spiritual Anti-Christ" (183). "It's a piece [Simplicitie's Defence] stuffed with wicked principles and gross and blasphemous deductions of familism, smelling rankly of the abominable doctrine of Swenckefield, Muncer, Becold, David Georgius, and of H. Nicholas, the first elder of the Family of Love, of the piece called Theologia Germanica, and the Bright Starre." There is much more to the same purpose.

1 This was the treatise so often

dangerous enemies as their malignant neighbors, the Narigansetts;" 2. that they would "never suffer Samuel Gorton, the pestilent disturber,. . . . . any more to go to New England to disquiet the peace thereof;" 3. that they would "suffer New Plymouth to enjoy their former liberty in the line of their government, which includeth

quoted in these pages under the title of "Hypocrisie Unmasked," &c. The date in the imprint of the edition is 1646. But Winslow sailed for England in the middle of December, 1646, at which time, according to the reckoning of the Old Style, there remained a little more than three months of that year. Again he says (Hypocrisie Unmasked, 77) that the time since his "departure from New England” had been "not much above two months" (comp. Pref., iv.); from which the inference is, that he published in the early part of March, 1647 (N. S.); a fact useful to be settled, as it shows that there was time for the book to exert an influence on that decision of the Commissioners which was announced in May.

The attentive reader constantly discerns in Winslow's book the influence of that state of affairs and of sentiment, which on his arrival he found existing in England. The Presbyterians and Independents were not unequally matched. He desired the goodwill of both. "How easy would the differences be reconciled between the Presbyterian and Independent way.

As they have fought together for the liberties of the kingdom, ecclesiastical and civil, so may they join together in the preservation of them." (Hypocrisie Unmasked, &c., 94.) He aims to avert the hostility of the Presbyterians by informing them that they whose cause he pleaded had not rejected the communion of Dutch, French, Scotch, or English of that inclining, and that they gave no disturb

ance to Presbyterians in New England. (Ibid., 95, 96, 98-100; comp. Vol. I. 489, note 2.) The English Anabaptists were a party too considerable to be slighted. Accordingly, he shows, in the case of Chauncy of Plymouth and others, how unmolested they might live in New England, if they gave no other offence than by their sectarian opinions and practice; and he avers, that, though "the churches of New England were confident through God's mercy that the way in which they walked..... concurred with those rules our blessed Saviour hath left upon record by the Evangelists and Apostles, nevertheless, if any, through tenderness of conscience, were otherwise minded, to such they never turned a deaf ear, nor became rigorous." (Hypocrisie Unmasked, &c., 101, 102.)

... yet

.....

The book sometimes quoted under the title, "The Danger of tolerating Levellers in a Civil State," is the same as Hypocrisie Unmasked, except that instead of the Dedication, in the latter, to the Earl of Warwick and his fellowCommissioners, the former has a full table of contents. As to the body of the respective works, they are not different editions, but both were struck off from the same types. This fact shows them to have been published about the same time; and, if so, they were intended to reach different hands. In respect to the "Danger of tolerating Levellers," Winslow well knew that he might look to a large class of his English friends for an active sympathy against Gorton.

their very seat, even Shawomet itself; "1 4. that they would refuse to receive appeals from New England; 5. that they would " patronize" him in the "just defence" which he was making, and thus place his constituents under an obligation to "engage with and for" the Parlia

1 Gorton had "taxed Plymouth to join with the Massachusetts to frustrate their government by virtue of their new charter." (Hypocrisie Unmasked, &c., 82.) The reference is to the Charter of Providence Plantations. (See below, p. 215.)

a

"The line of their [Plymouth's] government," argued Winslow, agreeably to his instructions, "includeth their [the Warwick Company's] very seat, even Shawomet itself." Of course this refers to the boundary to which Plymouth was entitled by the patent granted to Bradford by the Council for New England in 1630. (See Vol. I. 332.) At the time of that grant, the geography of the region was little known. The territory conveyed to Bradford was described in it as lying between the ocean on the east; 66 certain rivulet or runlet, there commonly called Coahasset alias Conahassett, towards the north; ..... the river, commonly called Narragansetts River, towards the south; and between and within a straight line directly extending up into the mainland towards the west from the mouth of the said river called Narragansetts River, to the utmost limits and bounds of a country or place in New England called Pokanoket alias Sowamsett westward, and another like straight line extending itself directly from the mouth of the said river called Coahasset alias Conahassett towards the west, so far up into the mainland westwards, as the utmost limits of the said place or country commonly called Pokanoket alias Sowamsett do extend, together with one half of the said river called Narragansett,

and the said rivulet or runlet, called Coahassett alias Conahassett," &c. (Brigham, Charter, &c., 22, 23.)

This definition of a western boundary for Plymouth Colony does not correspond to the natural features of the country. In the impracticability of putting a strict verbal construction upon it, the Plymouth people, it ap pears, adopted some interpretation which brought Shawomet within their bounds, an interpretation also approved by their allies in the Confederacy.

In urging, at this time, upon the Parliamentary Commissioners for the Colonies, that Shawomet belonged by patent to Plymouth, Winslow may seem to have condemned a former judgment of his. In 1670, Roger Williams wrote to Major Mason (see Vol. I. 422), that, when he was looking out for a place of refuge, Winslow told him that, if he would but cross the river to Seekonk, he would be "free," and beyond "the edge of their bounds.” Williams was an entirely honest man, and his statements are entitled to all that confidence which should respond to an intention to speak the truth. But he was also an impulsive and an imaginative man; nor is it safe to trust the memory of any witness, sixty-four years old, for the particulars of a conversation which took place when he was thirty. Supposing Winslow to have precisely expressed the opinion ascribed to him by Williams, it does not show that the same was the opinion of Winslow's Colony, or of other eminent persons in the Colony, equally entitled to be consulted; nor would his or their ex

ment and the Commissioners "against all opposers of the State, to the last drop of blood in their veins." 1

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The representations of Winslow exhibited the case to the Commissioners in a new light; and they hastened to relieve the anxiety of the colonists as to the most important question. To the claim of the Massachusetts Company to exemption from appeals, they replied: "We intended not to encourage any appeals from your 1647. justice, nor to restrain the bounds of your juris- May 25. diction to a narrower compass than is held forth by your letters patent, but to leave you with all that freedom and latitude that may in any respect be duly claimed by you, knowing that the limiting of you in that kind may be very prejudicial, if not destructive, to the government and public peace of the Colony ;" and they professed the like liberal intentions in respect to all the other governments and plantations in New England."2 On a hearing of Winslow, and of Gorton with his friends, at Westminster, "it pleased the Lord to bring about the hearts of the Committees, so as they discerned of Gorton, &c. what they were, and of the justice of the proceedings against them." Their application for an authoritative interference in their behalf obtained no more than an intercession that they might be treated with indulgence. The Commissioners wrote: "We commend it to the government, within whose jurisdiction they shall appear to be, (as our only desire at present in this matter,) not only not to remove them from their plantations, but also to encourage them, with protection and assistance, in all fit ways, provided that they demean

pression of it, unauthorized by a public act, preclude their changing it afterwards, on what they should consider better information respecting the intent of the patent and the rights of their community; nor would it impose an obligation upon any one.

July 22.

1 Hypocrisie Unmasked, &c., Pref., v.

Possibly this supererogatory assurance was suggested by Fenwick, who was now one of the Parliamentary Commissioners for the Colonies (Winthrop, II. 320), and who must have always had Connecticut in his mind.

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