HISTORY OF NEW ENGLAND. BOOK IV. PROGRESS IN THE REIGNS OF KING WILLIAM THE THIRD AND QUEEN ANNE. CHAPTER I. THE early dreams in New England of an independence of the parent country had faded away. A discouraging experience in the past, and new views of existing advantages and dangers, had combined to allay that enthusiasm for absolute liberty which prompted the emigrations. Religion was no longer, in the same degree as formerly, the central principle of public conduct. Economical interests had come to rival the interests and to modify and complicate the plans of politics. The local unanimity had been dissolved. Permanent parties had been formed with opposing New Engjudgments both upon local questions and upon questions of the relations of the Colonies to the empire; the men qualified to lead opinion were not, as formerly, agreed in opinion among themselves. Politics and parties in land The question may occur, why, in the dark times of the last two Stuart kings, the Puritan emigration had not been renewed, restoring the unanimity while it reinforced the numbers and the energy of New England. That such an enterprise should have such a revival is not in any hitherto experienced, or probable, course of things. The spirit which has stimulated it, dying a natural death, has no Improbabil gration. resurrection. The brief course of splendid triumph of Puritanism in England had been brought to an end ity of fur- by its own mismanagement. Even if champions like ther immi- Eliot and Hampden should again appear, what mind among them so sanguine as to believe that a second combination for the recovery of English freedom would issue more prosperously than the now frustrated struggle which they had inaugurated? When the worthless sensualist Charles the Second ascended the throne, English Puritans were no longer in a condition for joint counsels and common action. They were dispirited by a dismal defeat, incurred, as it seemed, by their own faults and discords. The early part of that reign was for them a time of merely 1661, 1662, helpless stupor and amazement. The Corporation 1663, 1665 Act, the Act of Uniformity, the Conventicle Act, and the Five-Mile Act constituted a succession of outrages that impoverished, scattered, and disarmed them.1 Then the King's leaning to measures of Comprehension and Indulgence, which would favor papist as well as sectary, crippled their power by dividing their sentiments, as it did in the succeeding reign. The Test Act had scarcely renewed the severity and the consternation, when the fiction of the Popish plot came to the aid of the patriot party, and all but secured the exclusion of the Romanist Duke of York from the succession to the throne. When that tide turned, only a little time passed before the seizure of the charter of Massachusetts into the King's hands; and the consequent establishment of a despotism in that Colony forbade English patriots to look thither for a refuge. Possibly, had the enterprise of the Prince of Orange failed, there might have been a second emigration of patriotic and religious Englishmen to the western world. But it would not have been projected in circumstances so inspirit 1667, 1672. 1673. 1678. 1684. 4 1 See above, Vol. II. 435–437. 3 See above, Vol. III. 19. See above, Vol. III. 241. ing as what were thought to attend the first, nor could the materials for it have been of a character so substantial. Richard Baxter might have made the voyage, and have brought some companions of a like earnest spirit. But a large number of men like Winthrop and Cotton, or like those who guided the Long Parliament and the Westminster Assembly, were not at that day to be found in England. Statesmanship there, as well in the patriot circle as in that of the court, was, in the time of King James and his son-in-law, of a type widely different from what it had been in the first half of the same century. And though the circle of Bates, Calamy, and Howe was composed of worthy Christian men, their virtue was not distinctly of the sort which welcomes danger, conflict, and sacrifice. Improbabil As bodies politic, the Colonies of New England were now disabled. The most powerful and restiff of them, after triumphing in a sharp contest with the Ministry of King Charles the Second, had afterwards been stricken to his feet. The charter of Massachusetts, the only unquestionable title of her citizens to any rights, proprietary, social, or political, had been vacated by regular process in the English courts. The condition of the four towns which were collectively called New Hampshire ity of furwas undefined; they were awaiting a new organ- ther resistization. Plymouth, never endowed with a charter, was at the royal mercy, as indeed she always had been except so far as she had been protected by the influence or the imputed power of Massachusetts. The charters which Connecticut and Rhode Island had owed to Lord Clarendon's jealousy of the confederacy and hatred of Massachusetts were understood to have been surrendered -the latter with little reluctance to the usurpations of Randolph and Andros. They had been resumed, but it "No part of English history is read, upon the whole, with less satisfaction than those thirteen years dur ance. ing which William the Third sat upon his elective throne." (Hallam, Constitutional History, Chap. XV.) was uncertain whether that anomalous proceeding would be allowed in England. On the other hand, the reasons which had quickened the desire for independence did not now exist in the same strength as in earlier times. Except in the twenty years that intervened between the assembling of the Long Parliament and the restoration of King Charles the Second, New England, through her whole history, had been agitated by fears for her religious freedom. She had been disquieted from the first to the last of that history by apprehension of encroachments from the English hierarchy, and during no small part of it by alarm lest the government that claimed her allegiance should itself fall into vassalage to the Roman see. On the British throne she at length saw a prince not only unquestionably Protestant, but understood to be strictly orthodox after the standard of her own doctrines and forms, - an unflinching Dutch Calvinist according to the pattern of the Synod of Dort. King William the Third was indeed no enthuCharacter siast for the creed in which he agreed with the colonists. No ardor possessed him but for the humiliation of France. During the seventeen years since he had been summoned, at the age of twenty-two, to direct the defence of his country against a devastating invasion of the French king, a succession of intrigues and wars against that monarch had been his perpetual occupation. Louis the Fourteenth, in his declining life, was after his incongruous manner a furious devotee to the Romish religion which he had always professed; and the safety of the reformed faith in England, Holland, and the North of Europe depended on successful resistance to his power. But the Protestantism of William of Orange was not so fastidious as to withhold him from alliances with the King of Spain, with the Emperor of Germany and other Catholic princes of the empire, and even with the Pope; nor was it so hearty as to make him willing to and position of King William. 1672. protect suffering Protestants at the cost of his political convenience, as was mournfully manifested by his desertion of the French confessors in the treaty of Ryswick. It might be true that, though the doctrine of predestination was dear to him as it made an uncalculating courage easy, his religious belief, on the whole, had no strong hold of his mind; for he was no brooder upon theories, but a busy man of affairs. But if in that case his Calvinistic subjects might not hope encouragement from him as a sympathizer, they might expect from him toleration as an indifferentist. Toleration had on the whole been the policy of his race, though his rough predecessor, Maurice, had broken the continuity of the tradition. William's position as Protestant head of coalitions composed of Catholics on the one hand, and on the other of Protestants of different names, imposed upon him as a necessity the disavowal of intolerant sentiments. And he had given reason to believe that he would favor such legislation for the Church of England as should offer easy terms of comprehension to dissenters. The disaffection with which the new settlement of the kingdom was regarded by many of the clergy inclined him to favor the sectaries, who were warmly its friends.1 Still, if King William was head of the Church of England, that body was constituted of warring members; nor would the degree of respect with which the rights of nonconformity were to be treated in his colonies be determined. by his friendship or his discretion. In the danger which had lately distressed the Church, the dissenters, to whom the Church had all along been so cruel, had to the new helped in its extrication. Had the Church learned moderation and lenity, and was it capable of grat Prospects as ecclesiastical administration. "Their [the clergy's] disaffec- fected to his person and title." tion made the King more inclinable (Kennett, History of England. III. to favor the dissenters, whom he 518.) generally looked upon as better af |