[343]. Massachusetts Records, vol. I, p. 87.
CHAPTER VII
AN ENGLISH OPPOSITION BECOMES A NEW
ENGLAND OLIGARCHY
In an earlier chapter, in discussing the problems which confronted Elizabeth, we spoke of an established church as a necessity in her day from all three standpoints—of religion, morals, and politics. We also touched upon the simplicity of problems as they appear to those in opposition, as contrasted with their aspect to those who bear the responsibility of power. In England, in the earlier part of the seventeenth century, in spite of the example of Holland, the doctrine of the necessity of a state church, to which all men must conform, in their capacity of citizens as well as of Christians, was still held, although the influence of the “dissidence of dissent,” as the logical outcome of individual interpretation of the Bible, was beginning to be felt. Voices were being raised in many quarters denouncing the intolerance of the various sects, both Anglican and Puritan; and, although the Protestants might consider that the religious glacier which held all men in its embrace was as rigidly frozen as ever, the ice was, in truth, rapidly melting beneath the surface. To Englishmen in tolerant Leyden, John Robinson was preaching that “magistrates are kings and lords over men properly and directly, as they are their subjects, and not as they are Christ's,” and that by “compulsion many become atheists, hypocrites, and Familists, and being at first constrained to practise against conscience, lose all conscience afterwards.”[[344]] In England, Chillingworth, through the doctrine of the innocence of error, was elevating toleration into a principle of justice and a practicable rule of government.[[345]] In the New World, Roger Williams was soon to begin his life-long struggle against what he vehemently denounced as “that body-killing, soule-killing, and State-killing doctrine” of religious persecution by the arm of the civil power.[[346]]
We cannot, perhaps, blame men for not being in advance of their age, or even for being behind it. The founders of the Bay Colony were but little qualified, by reason of the narrowness of their views and the intensity with which they were held, to lead men to any higher ground than that which they had been accustomed to tread. Moreover, having changed their place from members of an opposition to members of a government, their new responsibilities would tend to foster even more strongly that fear of innovation which is nearly always characteristic of the middle-class man in power. The exercise of authority is apt to prove an intoxicating draught, even to the best-intentioned men who have been unaccustomed to it; and, of the tiny group who now claimed absolute sway over two thousand subjects, rapidly increasing to sixteen thousand, none had held any position of administrative importance in the old country. Some of them had, indeed, occupied offices, but they were rather of a nature to encourage that intolerance of contradiction, and tendency to arbitrary action upon a small stage, which are apt, in time, to become characteristic of the petty judge, the schoolmaster and the clergyman. Of Endicott's whole career in England, for example, we know only that his rector spoke of him as “a man well knowne to divers persons of good note,”[[347]] which, in reference to a parishioner in a small country town, more probably referred to his moral character than to any administrative experience. Winthrop had held an unimportant position in a law court. Dudley had managed the estate of a nobleman. Cotton was the rector of a large provincial parish. The work which they and the other leaders did was done honestly; and although the course they pursued, in regard both to the religious qualification for the franchise, and to the later persecutions for religious beliefs, was, in the long run, to hamper the growth of the colony and to be partly responsible for the eventual loss of the charter, they should not be too severely condemned, perhaps, for the illegal and unjust, as well as politically unwise, course, upon which they now entered. It must be said, however, that, when the great opportunity was offered them of advancing the cause of religious liberty, they turned aside. To the new voices being raised on behalf of justice and humanity, the Massachusetts leaders were as deaf as Laud and the Anglican hierarchy. Equally, and for the same reason, each party solidly and consciously blocked the path to toleration in so far as lay in its power.
The problems of government in the new country soon came thick upon the little group from the opposition in the old. The notorious Morton, for example, was once more singing and trading in “his old nest in the Massachusetts,” in the autumn of the year in which Winthrop landed. There were valid reasons, notably his selling fire-arms to the Indians, which might have served adequately as warrant for his arrest by the authorities; but when that action was decided upon, the alleged grounds bore a curiously trumped-up appearance. In the official order for his apprehension, no crime was mentioned; and in his sentence the only matters cited were the “many wrongs he hath done” the Indians, and the theft of a canoe from them.[[348]] Whatever the moral nature of his intercourse with the natives, it was not likely that, from their standpoint, there had been any very serious crime committed against them by a man living almost isolated in their midst, and whose sole business was trading with them. The convenient, but apparently unfounded, suspicions of a murder committed by him in England, and a warrant procured from the Chief Justice for his shipment thither, could not have served as a basis for any sentence inflicted in Massachusetts.[[349]] The probable truth is that the Puritans either wanted to teach the discontented “old planters” a lesson, for which purpose Morton offered himself as an easy victim, or they suspected, what was indeed the fact, that he was in communication with Gorges.[[350]] Obviously, neither of these could be openly alleged as a cause for the punishment they inflicted, which was extraordinarily severe. He was put in the stocks and deported to England; his entire property was confiscated, and his house burned to the ground. Set at liberty in England with little delay, he got into communication with Gorges, and was soon joined by two other victims of colonial methods.
Gorges, though a stanch supporter of the Church of England, was in close relations with the Puritan peers. He and Warwick were having constant dealings, as both were active in the Council for New England, and his son John was a brother-in-law of the Earl of Lincoln, in whose house, as we have seen, the Massachusetts project took shape. There is nothing to indicate any hostility upon his part to the Massachusetts colony until 1632; and the several emissaries whom he secretly sent there were probably dispatched for the sole purpose of seeing whether or not the settlers were encroaching upon the lands claimed by himself and his son Robert, whose rights, it will be recalled, he specifically reserved when he consented to the granting of the Massachusetts charter. The grantees of that instrument, however, denied that the Gorges rights had any legal validity, and claimed and occupied the disputed land as their own. A quarrel was, therefore, inevitable, and as the Puritans, it must be confessed, had little respect for legality themselves, they could, when need required, be counted upon to take such steps as they might see fit to oppose any action of Gorges.
Winthrop had been scarcely a month on the shores of the Bay, when another newcomer arrived in the shape of one of the most picturesque and mysterious characters who were ever to stroll on Boston Common. Sir Christopher Gardiner, Knight of the Sepulchre (somewhat whited), suddenly appeared, with no ostensible business, but with that unexpected phenomenon in the Puritan colony, a pretty young mistress. To be sure, he called her cousin, but it was soon suspected, as Bradford somewhat quaintly wrote, that “she (after the Italian manner) was his concubine.”[[351]] In spite of the fact that a late defender has claimed that “he was unfitted for the quiet pleasures of domestic life,”[[352]] he seems to have made some efforts in that direction; for the authorities soon received word from London to the effect that he had two wives there, who were then in conference, and of whom one was calling loudly for his conversion, and the other for his destruction.[[353]] On the first of March, 1631, it was ordered by the Massachusetts court that he and seven others should be sent prisoners to England by the good ship Lyon;[[354]] but the knight, getting word of what was proposed, fled to the Indians.[[355]] Some weeks later he was taken into custody by the Plymouth people, who asserted that they had found on his person evidence that he was a Roman Catholic.[[356]] While he was lodged in jail in Boston, letters addressed to him by Gorges, as well as one to the absent Morton, came into the hands of Winthrop, who opened them, and decided that they indicated a design on the part of Gorges to regain possession of his land—an ambition not wholly unnatural.[[357]] Whether or not the authorities decided that it was wiser that Gardiner should not appear in England to add his testimony to that of Morton, nothing further seems to have been done to carry into effect the order for his deportation, and he was soon set at liberty.
Meanwhile a lonely settler from Maine had appeared in Boston, and had looked with favor upon Gardiner's fair companion. He decided to marry the lady and to take her back to the Eveless Eden of the Androscoggin. Gardiner himself accompanied them, and the curiously assorted trio spent the winter together at Brunswick, from which season there was an odd echo in the Maine law courts nine years later, when Gardiner's host, and not himself, was properly sued for a warming-pan stolen by the knight during his chilly stay. In the summer of 1632, Gardiner landed in England just in time to add his witness to that of Morton and Ratcliffe in Gorges's attack upon the Massachusetts charter.[[358]]
Ratcliffe, who was a mentally unbalanced servant of Cradock, had apparently talked loosely about the government and the Salem church. For these “mallitious and scandulous speeches,” as the crime was designated in his sentence by the court, he was whipped, had both his ears cut off, was fined the impossible sum of £40, and banished from the colony.[[359]] He was not long in joining Morton and Gardiner in England, and becoming one more arrow in Gorges's quiver.
These cases, moreover, though they proved more important individually, in their reaction upon the colony, by no means stood alone. A certain Thomas Gray, for an unspecified crime, was banished, his house was pulled down, and all Englishmen were enjoined from giving him shelter, “under such penalty as the Court shall thinke meete to inflicte.” Thomas Dexter, for saying, “This captious government will bring all to naught,” adding that “the best of them was but an atturney, &c.,” was put in the stocks, fined £40, and disfranchised. Henry Lynn, “for writeing into England falsely and mallitiously against the government and execuccion of justice here,” was ordered whipped and banished; while Thomas Knower was put in the stocks for saying that, if punished, he would have the legality of his sentence tried in England.[[360]]