Aug. 21. 1693. This opinion was the basis of subsequent arrangements, the same as those made for Connecticut. The Queen (the King being then in the Netherlands) communicated it as such in a letter, instructing the Colony to place a force of forty-eight men for the present under the command of the Governor of New York, to whom, in the previous year, the power of commanding the June 10 militia of Rhode Island had been transferred from Governor Phips, and with it the pending dispute respecting that authority.1 Almy further moved the question respecting the eastern boundary of his Colony, claiming May 15. that, rightly drawn, it would include a strip of territory, three miles wide, extending from north to south along the eastern shore of Narragansett Bay. The Privy 1694. July 11. Council, by the advice of the Attorney-General, Aug. 4. referred this question to "a commission of indifferent and unconcerned persons inhabiting near the places to inquire and certify the truth." 2 Disagree mont. But it was with Lord Bellomont more than with any other royal Governor that Rhode Island was on unsatisfactory terms. Narragansett Bay was a place of particularly convenient resort for the buccaneering vessels which ments with So infested at that time the ports of North America, Lord Bello-and which he had express charge to hunt down.3 Rhode Island was especially implicated in the criminal transactions complained of, by reason of the use which had been made of commissions issued by her Governors to private armed vessels during the seven years' war with France. Lord Bellomont received peremptory and minute instructions from the new Board of Trade to inMarch 9. vestigate these "disorders and irregularities," and 1699. 4 Colonial Papers for July 11 and 18, 1698, and Aug. 8, 1699. 1694, and Oct. 28, 1696. 1 R. I. Rec., III. 296, 304. 2 Ibid., 298. 3 Journal of the Board of Trade for April 20, Sept. 15, and Oct. 20, Testimony given to the Board implicated Governor Fletcher in complicity with the pirates. 4 R. I. Rec., III. 319, 322, 328, 335-342, 351, 373-377, 400. 1 Aug. 11. others related to them. These were soon followed by a severe reprimand to the Colony from the Board. The Board rebuked them for "shuffling" in their correspondence. "Your answers are so contrary to truth and to your duty, that we wonder how you could write. them.. You know better. But . . if it were really so [that the Deputy-Governor had erred through ignorance], you ought to have taken better care that such an "2 Lord ignorant person had not been put in such an office.”2 Bellomont wrote to the Secretary of the Board that this reproof of the Rhode Island people had "been a mortification to them." An agent was sent to England to accommodate affairs. He was disliked by Lord Bellomont, who describes him by saying that he "is one of their Council, yet keeps a little blind rum-house where the Indians are his best customers." 3 4 Nov. 21. Sept. 18-27. Lord Bellomont passed a week in Rhode Island, employed in the investigation with which he was charged, and as its result reported to the Lords of Trade the existence of a desperately bad state of things in that Colony. Under more than twenty heads he specified departures by its government and people from the provisions of their charter. Their rulers, he said, were incompetent and ill-conditioned persons. "A brutish man, of very corrupt or no principles in religion, and generally known to be so by the people, is in the place of 16 to Popple, Secretary of the Board of Trade, of Nov. 6, 1699, in British Colonial Papers.) During his visit to Newport at this time he received a petition from sixteen persons for the allowance of a salary for a minister of the Church of England in that place. Bernon (see above, 185, note) and another Huguenot were among the petitioners. Trinity Church, Newport, was the fruit of this movement. (Arnold, History of Rhode Island, I. 559; comp. 498, 556.) 66 names. Deputy-Governor," and as such had given commissions to private men-of-war," which sailed on piratical expeditions "to Madagaska, and the seas of India ;" and "the place has been greatly enriched" by the spoils of these adventures. "The Assistants, or Counsellors, who are also Justices of the Peace, and Judges of their Courts, are generally Quakers and sectaries, illiterate, and of little or no capacity, several of them not able to write their Their General-Attorney is a poor illiterate mechanic, very ignorant." No reliance was to be placed on the correctness of the copy of their laws, which, agreeably to a demand of the Board of Trade, had been transmitted to England. "Government have taken all this time to prune and polish them, yet I believe the world. never saw such a parcel of fustian. They have never erected nor encouraged any schools of learning, or had the means of instruction by a learned orthodox ministry. The generality of the people are shamefully ignorant, and all manner of licentiousness and profaneness does greatly abound, and is indulged." Sanford informed him that persons arrested under a charge of piracy found no difficulty in getting their bail-bonds filled to the amount of two or three thousand pounds. In letters of profuse and awkward compliment to Lord Bellomont, after his return to Boston, the Governor and Clarke endeavored to appease the "displeasure" and "disgust" which he had conceived against what they meekly called "an ignorant and contemptible" people." 2 1 In their strait they desired to make interest in England, and to this end chose successively six different persons to be their agents there. But all refused Nov. 21. to accept the place, for want of confidence, prob Agents in Oct. 25. 1 Report of Lord Bellomont to the Lords of Trade, in R. I. Rec., III. 385-388; comp. Report of Jahleen Brenton, to the same, Ibid., 2 Lord Bellomont's Journal, in R. I. Rec., III. 388-393. The original is in Mass. Archives, II. 100-117. 8 R. I. Rec., III. 394, 395, 396. 1700. ably, that they would obtain compensation.1 Jahleel Brenton, who had already been employed by them in London, though previously he had represented them unfavorably to the government, was con- May 4. firmed for the present in the agency.2 An ostensible compliance was made with the Navigation Laws by an "Act for supporting the Governor in the perform- May 6. ance of his engagement to the Acts of Navigation." 1 R. I. Rec., III., 379-382, 403, 410. 2 Ibid., 409. 3 Ibid., 437. 3 1701. CHAPTER VIII. THE government of King William had contemplated three objects in respect to New England: 1, To reduce that dependency to greater subordination, which purpose it had advanced in the principal Colony by the stinted grants in the new charter, and by rigorous interferences with the provincial legislation; 2, To enforce more strictly the commercial regulations of the empire, in which undertaking there had been small success; 3, To gain an advantage over France by a conquest of her chief colony, but this hope had been grievously disappointed. The government of Joseph Dudley in Massachusetts ran parallel with the reign of Queen Anne. That sovereign was a devotee to High Church principles; rather, she was governed by High Church prejudices and passions; and the religious tone of her reign was as bigoted and as hostile to nonconformists as the state of parties and other circum 1711. 1713. stances would permit.' But the Occasional Conformity Act, the restriction to churchmen of the right to teach youth, and other severities and insults to dissenters which dishonored her government, when, at a late period of it, the Tories came into power, were not measures of a character to be extended to the "If the Queen's life had preserved the Tory government for a few years, every vestige of the toleration would have been effaced." (Hallam, Constitutional History, &c., 627.) Through their influence [the influence of the nonjuring clergy] the Acts against Schism and Occasional Conformity were passed for the annoyance of Dissenters.' 2 Thus, after fifty years' exclu- |