The caustic pens of the Mathers and the bitter spite of the early New England historians have drawn for us an Andros whose haughty and vindictive face rises before the mind whenever the name is mentioned. Local patriotism in Connecticut has created a series of poetical myths in regard to his administration, which tend to obscure the sober truth of history. New York has more grateful memories of the governor who secured and extended her dominion and by his wise and steady policy protected her from her most dangerous foes. Virginia is less grateful as yet, the unfortunate quarrel of Andros with the clergy sufficing to obscure the many material benefits conferred on clergy and laity alike by his wise administration. It is a curious fact, that both in Virginia and in New England Andros failed to please the ecclesiastics, different as they were; but, by those who are not prejudiced in favor of spiritual domination, this will hardly be considered as a reproach.
The true reason of the hatred of Andros in New England, and of his failure for so long to obtain justice in New York, was that he was the agent appointed to carry out the plan of uniting the scattered and discordant colonies into one strong Dominion. The separatist spirit of those who preferred their petty local privileges to the benefits of the union, that spirit which has been so dangerous to the country throughout the whole course of its history, was at that time successful, owing to the entirely disconnected circumstance that the consolidation was urged by the ministers of a king who was misgoverning his people in England. In carrying out these measures, the letter of the law seemed to the colonists to be strained to the utmost as against what they considered their popular rights, and the fate of corporations in England alarmed the similar chartered bodies in America. James II., by his foolish and wicked projects in England, discredited his really statesmanlike object in America; the union, so desirable in itself, was discredited by the methods used to effect it, and the narrow theory of colonial integrity and independence survived to plague the descendants of the men who maintained it. It is important always to discriminate between the object sought and the means used to effect it. Had the consolidation been successful, James would be looked back upon as a public benefactor, and the motto from Claudian upon the seal of the Dominion, “Nunquam libertas gratior exstat” which reads like a mockery, would have been as dear to a united people as the “E pluribus unum” which they afterwards adopted.
New England historians have always found it difficult to admit that there could be any good in a man who adhered to the fortunes of the Stuarts, or who worshipped in the church over which Laud had been primate. But the time that has elapsed since the period of struggle should have mitigated, if not utterly extinguished, the ancestral hostility of Puritan and Prelatist. Men are learning (under the influence of commemorative festivities) to revise their opinions in regard to the harshness and unloveliness of the Fathers of New England; and it is to be hoped that, before long, justice may be done to the honesty of conviction and conscientiousness of purpose that inspired those who have been so long described as “malignants.” Is it too much to hope that men will be able to see that the Englishmen who charged with Rupert, and the Englishmen who prayed and smote with Oliver, were both contending for a principle which was dearer to them than life—the principle of stern resistance to the violation of constitutional law? If we honor the men who hated the arbitrary government of the Stuarts, it is unfair to condemn those who hated the far more arbitrary government of the Rump and the Protector.
Edmund Andros was born in London, December 6, 1637, of a family that was eminent among the adherents of Charles I.[102] His father, Amias Andros, was the head of the family; he possessed an estate upon the island of Guernsey, and was royal bailiff of that island. His mother was Elizabeth Stone, whose brother, Sir Robert Stone, was cup-bearer to the unfortunate Elizabeth the dispossessed Queen of Bohemia and Electress Palatine, and was also captain of a troop of horse in Holland.
At the time of Edmund’s birth, his father was marshal of ceremonies to the king;[103] and the boy was brought up in the royal household, very possibly on terms of intimacy with the young princes whom he afterwards served, who were only slightly his seniors. For a time he is said to have been a page at court; but if this be true, it must have been when he was extremely young, as court life ceased to have charms, if not absolutely to exist, after the civil war broke out in 1642, and at this time the boy was but five years old.
Faithful to the fortunes of his masters in discouragement and defeat, we find the lad in Guernsey with his father, defending Castle Cornet manfully against the Parliament, and, after its surrender, receiving his first lessons in the field in Holland under Prince Henry of Nassau. (It is a curious fact, trifling in appearance, but possibly not without significance, that during the last year of the Commonwealth, and at the time of the restoration, Increase Mather was chaplain of some of the troops in Guernsey, and may have, even at that early date, formed the bitter prejudice that is so evident in his later actions.)[104] The services of the Andros family were so conspicuous in this period of trial and discouragement, that Edmund with his father and his uncle were specially exempted by name from a general pardon that was issued to the people of Guernsey by Charles II. on his restoration, on the ground that they “have, to their great honor, during the late rebellion, continued inviolably faithful to his majesty, and consequently have no need to be included in this general pardon.”[105]
The young soldier, who found himself restored to home and safety at the age of twenty-three, had passed a stormy youth; his natural boyish loyalty had been strengthened by what he had suffered on account of it. He had seen those whom he most respected and revered dethroned and exiled, living as pensioners on the grudging bounty of inhospitable princes. He had seen the legal government of England subverted by force of arms by men whose professions of their respect for law were never louder than when they were overthrowing it, and had seen England ground down under the harsh rule of a military despotism. He had seen the orderly and regular services of the Church of England proscribed, its ministers turned out of their parishes to make room, not only for severe Presbyterians and iconoclastic Independents, but for ranting sectaries who made the name of religion a by-word and a mockery. It cannot be wondered that the young cavalier grew up deeply impressed with the horrors of rebellion and usurped authority, and with the conviction that much might be sacrificed for the sake of lawful and regular government, or that, being as he was a member of the church that had been proscribed and persecuted during the reign of the self-styled “godly,” he should have been rendered all the warmer in his attachment to her orderly and decent rights and ceremonies, as by law established.
It should be remembered that the severity shown to the Dissenters at the Restoration came largely from their close association with the civil war and the government of the Commonwealth. The cloak of religion had been made to cover the overthrow of the liberties of Parliament, the killing of the king, and the rule of Cromwell; and it is not unnatural, though most regrettable, that the victorious cavaliers should have failed to make the proper distinction between dissent and rebellion.
A knowledge of these early conditions of the life of Andros is necessary for a comprehension of his character. They show the influences which tended to form in him his most notable characteristics: loyalty to his sovereign, a passion for regularity and legal methods in the management of affairs, and a zeal for the Church of England. The promotion of the young soldier followed quickly, as he continued to display the fidelity and capacity of which his boyhood had given promise. His uncle’s position in the household of the Queen of Bohemia determined the direction of his promotion, and the nephew was made gentleman-in-ordinary in the same household in 1660, a position more honorable than remunerative, which was soon terminated by her death in 1662. His military training was developed by the war with the Dutch, in which he won further distinction and made his first acquaintance with America and American affairs.[106] The position he had held in the court of the exiled queen won him a wife in 1671, in the person of a young kinswoman of the Earl of Craven, who had been the devoted servant, if not the husband, of Elizabeth.[107] This Lord Craven was the one officer of the army who remained faithful to James II. to the last, and, though eighty years old, put himself at the head of his regiment of body-guards to defend the king from insult, when William of Orange was already in London.
The court positions held by Andros in the reign of Charles II. are not those of a brilliant young cavalier, or a roystering blade of the Restoration who only cared for place and plunder, wine and women; they indicate rather that passionate devotion to the house of Stuart, which the most worthless of that line were always able to inspire, devotion generally recompensed by gross ingratitude. His marriage was evidently, from the prominence Andros himself gives to it, a high connection for a simple country gentleman to make, but it did not have the effect of detaching him from a soldier’s life; for in the same year he appears still as major of the regiment that had been in Barbadoes, and even at that time he had obtained the reputation of being well versed in American affairs.[108]