[764]. J. Winthrop, History, vol. II, p. 223 f.

[765]. J. Winthrop, History, vol. II, pp. 341, 345, 354, f., 352.

[766]. Massachusetts Records, vol. IV, pt. ii, p. 25.

[767]. Kaye, English Colonial Administration under Clarendon, p. 142.

[768]. McIlwain, High Court of Parliament, pp. 12 ff.

CHAPTER XIII
THE REASSERTION OF IMPERIAL CONTROL

The Puritan Revolution in England had failed to establish a permanent government, which should provide for the liberty of the individual, and be consonant with the genius of the English race. The ensuing restoration of the monarchy was not the return of a king crushing rebellion by force of arms. It was the peaceful reëstablishment of an institution demanded by large and important elements among the people, who considered it as essential to the welfare of the state, and who believed that the individuals who might occupy the throne had been taught sufficiently by the events of the preceding two decades not to attempt to overstep the position that had come to be assigned to them in the popular view of the constitution. But if, in the sphere of practical politics, the Revolution had merely shattered the political edifice without having been able to build another, in the domain of political thought it had left a rich legacy of ideas, which were to mould into modern form the institutions now reëstablished by the will of the people. We have already seen how quickly the anti-English party in Massachusetts had seized upon one of the most revolutionary of the Commonwealth doctrines, and proclaimed for themselves, as taught by Parliament, that “salus populi is suprema lex.” These ideas, however, were not to bear their full fruit until detached from their theological origin and divested of their religious associations. This secularization of politics, by the substitution of parties for churches as political forces, was necessary before further advances could be made either in religious toleration or in civil liberty; and it was in the years following the Restoration that the transition occurred both in old England and in New.[[769]]

In the latter, and more particularly in Massachusetts, theology and politics had been more closely intertwined than anywhere else in the Empire, and the earlier course of the struggle to break them asunder has been indicated in the preceding chapters. As we have there pointed out, the fundamental idea of theocracy was such as to preclude the possibility of either civil or religious freedom. The latter was too evidently fatal to the maintenance of that peculiar form of government to be allowed, if it could possibly be suppressed; and the former could not exist in a state in which the entire political power was to be permanently wielded by a small minority, whose essential qualification was its assent to an unique form of ecclesiastical organization. To what lengths the theocratical party in Massachusetts were willing to go in their efforts to remain in power had been shown by their contest with the Quakers. Although they were defeated in that struggle, amid many evidences that religion and politics were becoming more and more distinct in the minds of the people, the struggle was by no means ended, nor the transition complete. The political contest with the mother-country, which was now to begin in earnest, and which has often been made to seem a struggle for liberty against tyranny, was in large part, in this early stage, merely a continuance, under another guise, of the attempt of the theocracy to maintain its position and to defy all efforts, either from within or without, to interfere with its unrestricted exercise of power.

The early years of the Restoration mark, in many respects, the beginning of the modern period of English history; and this is as true of the Empire as a whole as of the constitutional developments at home. The far-seeing colonial policy of Clarendon sought to take advantage of the new outburst of energy which marked the people at that time, in order to round out and consolidate the nation's colonial possessions; and the main aspects of imperial policy became military and commercial. The Act of Uniformity, passed in 1662, and aimed at the Puritans, did not include the colonies in its operation; and the course of events proved that the influence of the home authorities was thenceforth to be on the side of toleration in so far as America was concerned.

When Clarendon entered office, the colonial dependencies of England in the New World consisted in general of two isolated groups of settlements on the continent, with island outposts at the extreme north and south. A study of a map of the period reveals the essential weakness of the English position from the standpoint both of trade and of imperial defence. The two most important colonial events in Clarendon's ministry—the great extension of English continental territory to the south by the settlement of the Carolinas, and the acquisition of New Netherland—added enormously to the strength and unity of the Empire. By the elimination of the Dutch, Clarendon argued that not only would the northern and southern colonies be relieved of the presence of a hostile state lying between them, but the menace of a flank or rear attack by the French would be largely removed from New England by securing the important military advantages of the Hudson-Mohawk route, the Lake Champlain gateway, and the friendship of the Iroquois. Moreover, so long as Holland, which was England's most serious rival in the world's carrying trade, should remain in possession of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware, it would obviously be almost impossible to enforce the Navigation Acts, upon the observance of which, it was rightly believed at that stage, that the Empire's commercial success and power of defense almost wholly depended.