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 was undefined; they were awaiting a new organization. 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 was uncertain whether that anomalous proceeding would be allowed in England.

On the other hand, the reasons which had prompted 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. Throughout that period she had been disquieted 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 enthusiast for the creed in which he concurred with the colonists. He was ardent only 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 defence of the reformed faith in England, Holland, and the North of Europe was involved in 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. 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 professing of toleration. 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 was regarded by many of the clergy inclined him to favor the sectaries, who were warmly its friends.

But 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 non-conformity 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 helped in its extrication. Had the Church learned moderation and lenity, and was it capable of gratitude? and if it should be indisposed to relent, how far would it prove able to overrule

or to persuade a tolerant sovereign? The 1689. "Claim of Right," which constituted the April 11. settlement for Scotland, contained an express declaration against episcopacy in that kingdom; if one form of dissent from the established religion of England might be established in Scotland, why not another form be permitted in Massachusetts?

Weighty questions of a different tenor were waiting for solution. As well at home as in the colonies, charters had been arbitrarily dissolved; would justice prevail for their restoration, now that liberty was won, or would the new government profit by the misconduct of the old, and refuse to redress wrongs which it never would have ventured to inflict? or would right be accorded to the strong and withholden from the weak, and London be reinstated while Massachusetts was denied? In the recent controversies, the colonists had claimed an interest, which the crown lawyers had disallowed, in the Great Charter; would the claim be still rejected, or would the birthrights of Englishmen to life, liberty, and property be henceforward understood in Westminster Hall as rights of Englishmen living in a colony? The colonists were well able to manage their internal affairs; would their discretion and public spirit be respected, or would they be embarrassed and teased by a meddlesome policy at court? Would the Privy Council continue to superintend them with an intermitting and lax control, or would they be placed, as repeatedly in

former times, under a special jurisdiction likely to be more vigilant and more vexatious? Would this new close alliance with Holland, or would any consequences of the great change in England, affect the strictness of that administration of the Navigation Laws which had lately threatened so much trouble?

If ever the people of New England imagined that in their king, born the citizen of a republic, they were to find a friend by reason of his being a friend to popular institutions, no calculation I could have been more erroneous. Hard experiences had strengthened that love of power which belonged to his stern, self-relying, and ungenial nature. His life had been a long lesson of the inconvenience of restraints, and of divided authority, to one fated to act a great part. His enemy, the King of France, was master of his own resources; he could keep his secrets in his own breast; he could choose his agents; he could conceive and shape his own plans, mature them. with his own silent observations, and put them in execution whenever he saw the time to be ripe. William's moment of greatest apparent power was when he was at the head of the most numerous coalition which for the time being he had been able to form. But the more parties he had won to his alliance the more unmanageable had he made it. In projecting a negotiation or a campaign he must consult and persuade a cabinet of equals, with rival interests to be conciliated;